Great Cast, Crap Movie

 What A Waste

Event Horizon (1997) – Seven years ago, the spaceship “Event Horizon” with an experimental new drive, disappeared. It has reappeared near Neptune, and the “Lewis and Clark” goes to find out what happened. The missing vessel has many mysteries to reveal.

Directed by Paul Anderson

Starring Laurence Fishburne, Sam Neill, Joely Richardson, Jason Isaacs, Kathleen Quinlan

Why I Liked It – You’re joking, right?

For all its big budget visual flash, the movie lost me in the first ten minutes. Special effects dominated the first ten minutes of the movie without contributing to the story or character development. It consumed more than a third of the special effects budget. I’d want a lot more story “bang” for those kinds of bucks. Like so many science fiction movies in the age of CGI effects, the movie is more about being flashy than telling a story. There are lots of explosions, flashes of light, loud noises, jump cuts and all the techniques to keep the audience emotionally on the edge of their seats. Add a huge dose of horror movie gore and violence, and it turns out you can fill out the time of a full motion picture with very little plot.

And you get “Event Horizon”.

The “Event Horizon” disappeared on its first mission. With a space warping drive, the plan was to head Proxima Centauri, but the ship disappeared. Seven years later, it re-appears, orbiting Neptune. Captain Miller (Fishburne) and the crew of the “Lewis and Clark” are recalled from leave to investigate. With the designer of the ship (Neill) in tow, they head to the edge of the solar system. A lot of bad stuff is waiting for them.

This is a haunted house movie. Honestly, it’s a science fiction movie only because the haunted house is a spaceship. There’s some mumbled discussion of the new drive that folds space (using an explanation that I first came across when I read Madeleine L’Engle’s “A Wrinkle in Time”). Add a few mindless mentions of hell and evil, then fill in with lots of dead bodies and gore. Boom. It’s a movie!

Not a very good one, however.

Yes, I know it’s got a cult following. If you enjoy this movie, go for it. It’s visually interesting up to a point. The problem for me is that there isn’t any depth here. That’s not the cast’s fault. Sam O’Neil leads a solid group of actors. Other than flying through air after explosions and being eviscerated, they don’t have a lot to do. The movie is filled with the usual dumb things people do in both horror and science fiction films. If there’s a mysterious, liquid barrier that you’ve never seen before, naturally you stick your hand in it. Find a ship that’s filled with dead bodies, floating body parts, and recordings of hideous screams and violence of the first crew? Stick around like nothing is going on. (Seriously, no one even mentions the possibility of some infectious agent?) The level of gore was high, but the original cut was significantly higher. I guess I should categorize this as a haunted house/slasher/science fiction movie.

What I can’t do is categorize it as worth seeing.

You can stream “Event Horizon” on Amazon Prime, Paramount+, Google Play, Apple TV+, Vudu, YouTube, MGM+, FuboTV

Rating – ** Not Impressed

 Here’s the good news: You don’t need to watch the movie after this trailer!

All the important bits are in it.