EVENT HORIZON (1997) 95m.
It's not that EVENT HORIZON isn't well made. It's just that I've been there before. In fact, I'm hard pressed to think of another film more entirely fabricated of quotes from other movies. Barely five minutes into the story I found myself sidetracked with references from obvious candidates like ALIEN, LIFEFORCE, and 2010, but the quotespotting soon brought forth non-SF films such as DON'T LOOK NOW and THE SHINING, and culminated with SOLARIS and, God help me, Disney's THE BLACK HOLE.
Why is it - pardon the pun - that black hole movies always suck? It's a fascinating subject that still hasn't been treated right by Hollywood. In this case, the Event Horizon is not the rim of a black hole, but the name of a spaceship that reappears in Neptune's orbit after a seven year absence. But maybe it's really a non-Event Horizon. It's a Marie Celeste in Space scenario, the kind of story that early STAR TREK episodes bought the patent on years ago. To be fair, the opening scenes are writ large upon the screen, at least proving once again that SF cinema was the reason that Panavision was invented. The actors - Laurence Fishburne and Sam Neill head the cast - are all fine, the sets are great, the budget is big, there is some legitimate haunted-house atmosphere, a couple of gripping sequences, and at least one moment that made me laugh (when Fishburne decisively announces they're vacating the ship). But there are still holes in the plot, and I don't mean the black kind either, that keep the film from being solidly grounded: the abandonment of all scientific rationale (even Neill's pragmatic Doctor gives up) shows that the film-makers were less interested in explanation than effect. And, come to think of it, isn't there a crew member unaccounted for at the end?
It may not be the movie's fault. I guess I was expecting something more purely science-fictional, and instead got that SF-horror hybrid that seems to have consumed the genre of late. If I had seen EVENT HORIZON fifteen years ago I would have no doubt loved it. But you can only jump out of your seats from the same shock effects so many times, and after that there's not a lot left for a story to go on. Which is a shame, because I wanted to enjoy this film more than I did. Contrary to its title, EVENT HORIZON didn't take me into unchartered territory. The most unexpected thing about the ending was hearing a song by the Prodigy played over the final credits.
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews