Event Horizon (1997)

★★½
Event Horizon represented Paul W. S. Anderson's most ambitious project to date (1997). His debut film was Shopping, a little-known but respectable effort about thieves who crash cars into stores to steal merchandise. He was also responsible for Mortal Kombat, one of the better video game adaptations. That movie's financial success opened doors for Anderson and gave him the clout needed to take on a bigger challenge. Event Horizon is a space movie with some horror mixed into it. Among Event Horizon's virtues is that it's a sci-fi thriller that gives us a future world that is mostly technologically plausible. I liked a tense scene featuring a man about to be exposed to space, and his commanding officer gives him all the right directions to minimize the damage to his body. There's attention to detail here. What's missing is a lack of ambition. The technical look is great, the special effects are realistic, and the premise is intriguing. Anderson's film just doesn't do these finer qualities much justice. He's satisfied to tell the tale and insert effective imagery, some shocking, but it feels like there's more to the story. Studio interference played a role, according to Anderson, and that wouldn't be a surprise. A similar fate would befall Walter Hill's Supernova several years later.

The setup is interesting. A ship called the Event Horizon has been missing for seven years. In the year 2047, a faint signal from Neptune reveals that the ship might still be intact. Captain Miller (Laurence Fishburne) and his crew onboard the Lewis and Clark have been sent to investigate. Along for the ride is Dr. Weir (Sam Neill), who helped design the Event Horizon. After 56 days, the crew wakes up from an extended sleep, and that's when we learn more about its mission. The Event Horizon was the first ship to be outfitted for a new kind of space flight. At its core is a device that can create a black hole, and with that awesome power the ship can bend space to travel light years in a few seconds. The Event Horizon disappeared during a test flight, but now it has returned. Dr. Weir wants to know what happened to it. The crew of the Lewis and Clark was pulled off much-deserved leave and isn't too thrilled to be sent out to Neptune.

Sure enough, the Event Horizon is intact, but its crew is missing. Justin (Jack Noseworthy), the Lewis and Clark's engineer, discovers the Event Horizon's core, which is a sphere surrounded by three rings. The sphere creates a void that sucks Justin in, then spits him out in a crazed state. Dr. Peters (Kathleen Quinlan) tries to help Justin, but his condition is too critical. They need to get him back to Earth. That proves to be a difficult task, because the Lewis and Clark suffered extreme hull damage and has lost its carbon dioxide scrubbers. Meanwhile, hallucinations beset the crew. Dr. Peters thinks she sees her son. Dr. Weir sees his former wife. Everyone hears noises. As expected with this kind of movie, we lose characters one by one due to various elaborate deaths. There's a decent mystery buried here. I was curious as to the reasons behind the strange events on the Event Horizon. One scene in particular, featuring a recording of the original crew's demise, is violently bloody, and it piqued my interest. That mystery has no payoff, though.

The experiment worked, but wherever the Event Horizon went, something affected the original crew mentally, and that "something" returned seven years later along with the ship. The presence onboard starts going to work on the Lewis and Clark's personnel, exploiting their fears and driving them to take illogical actions, with catastrophic results. Dr. Weir, always protective of his design, becomes overly defensive and pushes back on any effort to abandon or destroy the ship. All of this could have made for a claustrophobic nightmare of a movie, like Alien and other peril-in-space stories, but there's nothing of interest beyond the visuals and shock value.

Event Horizon looks fantastic and sets up a pretty good mystery, even though it doesn't solve it. That's okay, to an extent. If characters are faced with a dilemma that they don't understand, the situation might call for escape rather than sticking around and further endangering themselves. The question to ask in this case is, does the mystery service the story at all? The Shining is an excellent example of ambiguity being an asset. Event Horizon's antagonist is an unseen force driving the characters to their doom. I mentioned earlier that studio interference factored into this movie's production. That isn't lost on me. Writer Philip Eisner and Paul Anderson might have had a better movie on their minds. The production got bogged down and jerked around, and this is the result. That's a shame, because the good parts are so good.

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