Paul Anderson's Event Horizon

Event Horizon: Golar Productions/ Paramount Pictures
Rating: USA: R/ UK: 18/ Australia: MA

Hm…it seems the good folks here at Epinions have chosen to place this movie in the "Science Fiction/ Fantasy" film category—a designation that I don’t particularly agree with. Sure, Event Horizon looks like a science fiction film—it’s got spaceships and star bases and it’s set in outer space…it’s even got a scene where one character spouts off some pretty impressive sounding stuff about physics. However, if you strip it down to its most basic level, Event Horizon is really a horror film with a slight sci-fi twist…think of it as The Shining, only in outer space.

The plot of Event Horizon deals with the crew of the Lewis and Clark, a deep space rescue ship. In the beginning of the film, we learn that man has made some serious progress in space travel during the 21st century—colonizing Mars, building space stations, and creating a ship called the Event Horizon. The Event Horizon is a new age deep space ship that uses some kind of fancy gravitational drive in order to bend space and bring two points at opposite ends of the galaxy right next to each other—in essence, making a seventy year trip occur in the space of a moment. The ship is sent out for its first mission in the year 2040, and it promptly vanishes—never to be heard from again. Jump ahead to the year 2047—scientists pick up a distress signal from an orbit around Neptune…a distress beacon from the Event Horizon.

Captain Miller (Laurence Fishburne: Deep Cover, What’s Love got to do With it?) and his crew, along with the Event Horizon’s creator Dr. William Weir (Sam Neill: In the Mouth of Madness, Jurassic Park) are ordered to travel to the ship, rescue any survivors, and bring the Event Horizon back to port—a task that may very well cost them their lives.

And that’s where things get really interesting. Since the Event Horizon travels through compressed space (by creating, then travelling through, a mini black hole), no one can really say where it’s been for the last seven years. When Miller and crew reach the ship, they find a vessel that’s almost completely empty, yet shows signs of life throughout when they do a bio-scan. In essence, the Event Horizon has become a living, sentient being—a haunted house in outer space. Basically, the ship’s been to Hell and back (or as Sam Neill says in that wonderfully melodramatic way of his, it’s been "to a dimension of chaos")…and it’s brought Hell with it.

The film borrows heavily, and quite liberally, from numerous other movies. While watching, you’ll notice elements of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Hellraiser, The Shining, The Haunting, Alien, and Sphere as well as countless other films. However, the film’s strength is that it takes these familiar characters, plot elements, etc. and twists them just enough to make them interesting. It’s a thin line between homage and theft, and I find that Event Horizon winds up on the homage side.

Paul Anderson (Mortal Kombat) directs the film, and he does a nice job—for the most part. The Event Horizon offers up a multitude of intriguing rooms for Anderson to use as setpieces—which he does, and quite effectively, too. Scenes on the dark and deserted bridge, in the medical bay, and most impressively, in the reactor core drive (a room that looks like something straight of a Giger/Barker piece of artwork) all convey a genuine sense of menace. However, Anderson often seems more intrigued with showcasing the film’s elaborate sets than devoting time to any kind of character development or even the plot itself. The original cut of Event Horizon reportedly ran 20+ minutes longer, and delved into where the ship had been with more depth. Anderson thought this cut ran too long and edited it down to the 95-minute version available now—which I think was a mistake as we’re left with too many unanswered questions at the film’s end.

Laurence Fishburne and Sam Neill really shine as the captain and the doctor, bringing some legitimacy to what might have become just another Alien clone. The rest of the cast is solid, if ultimately forgettable, and features performances from Joely Richardson and Kathleen Quinlan amongst others.

Still, the film’s greatest strengths are its visuals. Anderson infuses the movie with some absolutely stunning shots. The Event Horizon itself is a lot like a carnival funhouse—open and menacing in some parts and terrifyingly cramped and claustrophobic in others. The countless shots of the reactor drive (which is essentially a large metal ball with three spiked bands gyroscoping around it) fill the audience with a definite sense of dread…because you never know when it might spring to life.

The film also gives us a fair amount of gore. The fate of the original crew is gruesome and horrific, made even more so by Anderson’s decision to show the gore in a hyper edited series of shots made up of a bunch of rapidly cut images. This lets us know we’ve seen something gross, but allows our mind to figure out what it is—and our mind always makes it worse. It’s an effect that far too few filmmakers utilize, instead choosing to leer and linger on any gore FX. But, don’t fear—if hardcore gore is your thing, then Event Horizon should please you. There are corpses with no eyes, a man who is gutted, then hung suspended by a series of hooks, and a scene where one character pops out his own eyes. All of the gore work is top notch and extremely realistic. Ultimately, Anderson gives us a well-balanced attack—with both overt and subliminal gross outs interspersed throughout the film…which keeps the viewer continually unsettled.

In the end, I’m at a loss as to why so many critics and filmgoers didn’t like Event Horizon. While I don’t think it’s a brilliant film by any stretch, it is a taut and suspenseful updating of the standard haunted house tale. Sure, it gleefully rips off dozens of other films for ideas and imagery, but it does so in a way that clearly demonstrates that the filmmakers not only like, but also appreciate these other films. There’s a comfortable sense of familiarity in these images—yet they still manage to disturb us. While the narrative falters a bit in the second and third acts, there’s still enough of the standard campfire tale elements here to evoke a response in even the most jaded of audiences—and because of that, I think it’s a film well worth seeing.