D: Paul Anderson
S: Lawrence Fishburne, Sam Neill, Joley Richardson
Cheaply-made cross-breed of Alien, Hellraiser and The Amityville
Horror (with a smidgen of Solairs) pitting a disparate group
of astronauts against sinister forces inside a derelict space craft. Essentially
a haunted house movie set in outer space, Event Horizon is composed
perhaps of overly-familiar ingredients and squanders several opportunities
to turn the screws and produce some gripping variants on the formula. But
it does a solid enough job within its own frames of reference and provides
some of the requisite chills, shocks and moments of gruesome nastiness necessary
for an average genre hit.
Sam Neill is the scientist whose experimental space ship 'Event Horizon'
disappeared seven years before on a top secret mission. When it suddenly
reappears in a decaying orbit around Neptune, he joins a special rescue
team bound to recover what crew and equipment they can. Lawrence Fishburne
is the no-nonsense captain of the rescue vessel, aided by a crew including
Joley Richardson and Sean Pertwee (of i.d. fame).
The Alien ingredients immediately become obvious as we begin to pick
out which characters will die and when as soon as they are introduced (though,
funnily enough, Richardson's Ripley-inspired first officer is the most underdeveloped
character in the film).
Meanwhile Neill explains that the ship was sent on a mission to exceed light
speed through using an artificial black hole as its engine to 'fold space'
(a welcome, if tiny, fragment of non-Star Trek sci-fi physics). Its
disappearance and its whereabouts for seven years are a mystery that he
desperately wants to solve, his devotion to his work having driven his wife
to suicide and taken him into a world of guilt and obsession ever since.
When the team arrives on the spacecraft, they find themselves assailed by
creepy hallucinations which reveal secret demons from their past as they
try to piece together what happened to the previous crew. Eventually they
come to the conclusion that the ship has not come back from the beyond quite
the same as it went and realise that they are in grave danger.
Philip Eisner's script contains elements of several previous films, most
notably Alien and Hellraiser. But in itself it is too slackly-structured.
It does not really allow enough time for the characters to develop and insufficiently
establishes their predispositions to hell and damnation before the nightmares
set in. This is particularly evident in the character played by Neill, who
abruptly transforms from the geeky, expositional scientist into an obsessional
maniac seemingly 'possessed' by the ship. The revelations about his wife
come too late to allow us time to study his descent, which is then too sudden
to be frightening (and a real opportunity has been missed to put her among
the original crew of the haunted ship and thus make his attraction to its
evil charms all the more inevitable).
It is as if Anderson and Eisner are more concerned with shock than terror,
and thus hit you with the gruesome images before building motivation (after
taking the requisite amount of time to wander the spooky corridors in anticipation
of some cinematic 'stinger'). The result is somehow less than either Alien
or Hellraiser, without the former's gripping, quiet suspense or the
latter's ability to draw you into the depths of human depravity and righteous
hellish retribution. Too many of the characters' fatal flaws are merely
minor (with some of them seemingly blameless), and the central opposition
between Fishburne and Neill is muted by the clumsy exposition. The former's
eventual sacrifice to save his crew is not quite as heroic as seems to have
been intended, and menacing as Neill becomes in the film's latter stages,
he never manages to be truly frightening because our sympathies for him
are never fully engaged before he goes off the rails.
On the technical side, the film is obviously less well financed than many
of its Hollywood equivalents, and generally uses its resources very well.
The production design is suitably oppressive, more possessed of the baroque
decorations of horror films than the usual clinical functionalism of science-fiction,
and the gory makeup effects are given the swift, almost subliminal exposure
necessary to keep things on the right side of unsettling. Anderson, who
helmed the computer game adaptation Mortal Kombat, has enough directorial
competence to keep the film moving, and though the shocks become quickly
predictable, he does manage to sustain an atmosphere of tension strong enough
to keep the audience from laughing outright.
But overall, Event Horizon is something of a missed opportunity;
ordinary when it might have been quite gripping, eerie when it might have
been frightening, and occasionally risible despite the best efforts of all
concerned. It is unlikely to generate a substantial cult following but is
interesting in its own way and worth a peek for genre fans.
Review by Harvey O'Brien copyright
1997.