A rescue crew investigates a spaceship that disappeared into a black hole and has returned with someone or something new on board.
Paul W.S. Anderson’s foray into the horror genre began with 1997’s “Event Horizon,” a science fiction horror film that materializes in deep space. Inspired by Ridley Scott’s “Alien” and James Cameron’s “Aliens,” both films are heavily influenced throughout “Event Horizon,” with tough-as-nails characters spouting hardened, no-nonsense dialogue and military jargon reminiscent of “Aliens,” at times blatantly so. While Anderson’s films have not generally been well received, especially by critics, he thinks of himself as a “populist filmmaker” who only cares about entertaining the audience and less about what critics think.
While I enjoyed “Resident Evil” and “Alien vs. Predator,” everything else he directed was mediocre, with “Event Horizon” being his strongest and most effective movie to date. Maybe somewhere down the line, he’ll return to the confident and unapologetic filmmaker who made “Event Horizon” instead of the clichéd caricature he has evolved into.
In 2047, the deep space research vessel Event Horizon unexpectedly reappears in a decaying orbit around Neptune after having mysteriously disappeared seven years earlier. The rescue vessel Lewis & Clark is dispatched to Neptune to investigate the ship and find out where it has been all these years and if its crew is still alive. Captain Miller (Laurence Fishburne) is the leader of the Lewis & Clark, and he and his crew, having been called away from some much-needed time off, are not happy that they have to escort Dr. Weir (Sam Neill), the designer of the Event Horizon, on their mission. Once they reach Neptune’s orbit, they discover the Event Horizon is in pristine condition, but none of the crew are anywhere to be found.
As they enter the ship, one by one, each crew member begins to experience vivid and violent hallucinations and waking nightmares corresponding to their own personal fears and regrets, privy only to them. They discover a video recording from the Event Horizon’s crew involving debauchery, group sex, and the massacring of each other, with many of the crew members’ eyes being gouged out of their sockets. The last part of the recording hears the captain reciting a phrase in Latin, “Liberate tutemet ex inferis,” translated into English, “Save yourself from hell.” Weir informs Miller and his crew that the ship had been built with the sole purpose of faster than light speed by creating a self-contained wormhole, thereby allowing the vessel to travel from one point in the Universe to another, millions of light years away but as the crew continues to experience strange happenings, they quickly come to believe the ship traveled to a hell dimension, and when it returned, it brought hell back with it. Now Miller and his crew must try to leave the Event Horizon, but survival seems more unlikely as its evil powers expand.
“Event Horizon” is a beautiful-looking film, shot in glorious widescreen by the late cinematographer Adrian Biddle, known for “Aliens,” “The Princess Bride,” “The Mummy,” and “V for Vendetta,” to name but a few. No handheld camerawork here, just crisp, wide shots of all the action transpiring within the frame, unlike so many movies of its ilk nowadays that cannot contain the action and allow it to spread in every possible direction. The cast is uniformly good in their respective roles, and there’s been talk for a long time of a Director’s Cut in the near future, showing more blood and gore, but as the years pass by, the likelihood of that transpiring becomes more and more improbable. I have always given Anderson kudos for not turning “Event Horizon” into another “monster in space” flick; they are a dime a dozen; instead, he successfully crafts a horror story based on each character’s own personal fears and gives them a visual representation in human form, and that is scarier than any Xenomorph hiding in the shadows. If you want a good old-fashioned sci-fi horror, “Event Horizon” is worth checking out.
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