CRITIC ESSAY
EVENT HORIZON 1997
27%
Directed by Paul W. S. Anderson
Written by Philip Eisner
Starring Laurence Fishburne, Sam Neill, Kathleen Quinlan, Joely Richardson, Richard T. Jones
Event Horizon is a ruthless, relentless film, which partly explains why it was so loathed by reviewers when it came out in 1997. Director Paul W. S. Anderson has never exactly been a critics’ darling—his movies tend to be blunt, violent, and filled with cheap thrills—but the write-ups for this ambitious sci-fi horror picture, his third feature, were particularly dismissive: “A boring and blood-soaked mess,” wrote Leah Rozen of People magazine. “I hear that the sound designer gets commission on every eardrum shattered,” Ryan Gilbey wrote in Britain’s The Independent.
It didn’t help, of course, that Event Horizon at times evoked (or at least sought to evoke) some actual classics. You could describe Philip Eisner’s script as a mash-up of Forbidden Planet, Solaris, The Shining, and Alien (with a dash of Aliens thrown in), but you’d have to overlook the inelegant dialogue and utter lack of subtlety, not to mention its whole-hearted embrace of lowest-common-denominator shock tactics.
And yet it is perhaps for all these reasons that Event Horizon remains so unforgettable and upsetting and, yes, exciting. Anderson’s directness of approach, hard-edged treatment of his characters, and general unwillingness to turn away from gore and grisly violence often lends his work a uniquely unforgiving, unsettling atmosphere. And on the Event Horizon itself—a possessed, murderous spaceship that has literally been to hell and back—he found the perfect setting.
Anderson’s film starts off as another familiar sci-fi tale about a dangerous mission in outer space. The year is 2047, and the Lewis & Clark, a search-and-rescue vessel commanded by the stoic but compassionate Captain Miller (Laurence Fishburne), has been tasked with exploring a once-lost ship that has mysteriously reappeared. Dr. Weir (Sam Neill), the scientist who designed the rediscovered vessel, joins the Lewis & Clark for the new expedition and informs the crew that the lost ship was in fact on a top-secret mission to create “a gateway to jump instantaneously from one point to another lightyears away” by bending space and time. Nobody knows how and why it’s now returned—or where it’s been all these years. All they have is an old, unearthed distress call from the Event Horizon with someone seemingly creaking, in Latin, “Liberate me” (Save me).
That cryptic message, combined with the ship’s dark, chasmic interiors, conjures the essence of a gothic nightmare. Exploring the Event Horizon, our heroes find it empty of all crew save for a floating, eyeless corpse and thick, gory layers of blood along the walls. The vessel’s interior looks at times more like a massive, elaborate medieval torture device than a state-of-the-art spacecraft. Even the doors have spikes on them for some reason. The “gravity core”—the bizarre, giant device that powers the ship’s space-and-time-bending gateway (the fake movie science here is truly impressive)—looks like a giant mace revolving inside two giant studded metal collars.
Soon, the crew of the Lewis & Clark are having troubling visions that reference their most sensitive memories. The already psychologically fragile Dr. Weir had started the film with a nightmarish vision of his wife, who committed suicide years ago, but now he seems to relive the night of her death. The ship’s medical technician, Peters (Kathleen Quinlan), sees her disabled son with garish wounds on his legs.
We understand soon that the Event Horizon itself is prompting these visions—that with its journey into another dimension, the ship somehow became sentient or, maybe more accurately, possessed. “She tore a hole in our universe, a gateway to another dimension—a dimension of pure chaos, pure evil,” says Dr. Weir. So… hell? “Hell is only a word. The reality is much, much worse.”
The subgenre of sci-fi horror is an intriguingly conflicted one. It’s a hybrid of two genres that, at least on the surface, often speak to different impulses, one to the scientific and the other to the supernatural. Of course, both turn on a fascination with the unexplainable, and science itself often makes for startling, monstrous creations. Space is indifferent; hell is cruel. There’s a subtle difference between these two ideas, but in joining them together, Event Horizon conjures up a truly chilling conceit. Chilling, but ridiculous. Because in this film’s conception, not only is hell a real place, but one can apparently reach it via spaceship and some fancy math.
How exactly does one tackle something like this with a straight face? Well, with a straight face: Anderson resists the siren call of camp or wink-wink self-consciousness. He takes the idea seriously or, to put it more plainly and colloquially: he goes there. When the crew of the Lewis & Clark finally sees what happened to the crew of the Event Horizon, what they (and we) witness is unusually disturbing, with flashes of torture, anguish, and bodily mortification. The glimpses are extremely brief, but they are many. Often, we’re not even sure what exactly we’re looking at, but we see just enough to fire our imaginations in entirely unsavory directions; it’s hard to shake the image of a blood-soaked, grimacing man offering up his eyes to us.
Event Horizon is a uniquely, gloriously nutty movie. In one sense, the critics were right: it is filled with jump scares and sudden shocks and unnecessarily loud noises, the tactics one often associates with unimaginative filmmakers who don’t want to do the work of crafting inventive scares. But such elements also put us in a genuinely uncertain and uneasy state: we sense a consciousness behind the camera that might be as merciless as the ship itself—one unafraid to kill off major characters and to show us things from which most other films shy away. It’s a movie that refuses to play by the typical rules of its chosen genres. In Event Horizon, anything seems possible.
Rotten Tomatoes’ Critics Consensus Despite a strong opening that promises sci-fi thrills, Event Horizon quickly devolves into an exercise of style over substance, whose flashy effects and gratuitous gore fail to mask its overreliance on horror clichés.