Silver Screen Resolution, Take Two: Event Horizon

For my 2018 Resolution Project, I decided to take a page out of Lane’s book and do my own Silver Screen Resolution (hence the Take Two part of the title). There are a lot of movies out there I haven’t seen but feel like I should have, or movies that I’ve simply wanted to see and have yet to get around to it. With a deadline of some kind, now I’ll have to finally make a point to find them, get them, and watch them. My rules for the resolution are slightly different in that:

1. They must be spec-fic (this has not changed).
2. The movie will not be one that is in theaters or that would be part of a Sound Off!
3. They don’t have to be popular – or even something folks have heard about.

But I’ve decided to take my resolution to the next level as well, since I had more than 12 movies on my list that I wanted to see. And since we’re in “Take Two” mode, I might as well up the ante: I will instead be seeing two spec fic movies per month rather than just one. Originally I’d planned to watch this closer to Halloween since it’s a horror film with a science fiction setting, but considering how a lot of the movies I have left on my list are surprisingly horrorish, I figured why not. So without further ado, let’s go to space!

There will be spoilers.

I’d always held off on seeing Event Horizon because I don’t normally do horror movies. They freak me out, and my imagination gets the better of me to the point that I’m ready to fistfight anything once the lights go out (that’s not a joke — I really will tense up and ball up my fists when coming up the stairs with the dark basement behind me). Given that when the movie was released in 1997 the reaction was, “Ew scary gross!” from pretty much everyone and I was only 14 at the time, yes, it was not my cup of tea. Ironic, I suppose, given that I’d seen Aliens when I was 10, but there’s a difference between trained Marines with big guns shooting up aliens and a ship controlled by ghosts or evil with no way to fight it. Screw that.

But I’m a big girl now, so I sucked it up and hit play. Besides, how scary could a ’97 movie featuring Laurence Fishburne and Sam Neill be? …With very Matrix-like music nonetheless…

In 2015 (HA!) we put the first colony on the Moon. In 2032 (okay, we still have time…) we started commercial mining on Mars. In 2040 we sent out the Event Horizon for deep space research and a fancy new space-time-folding black hole gravity drive. But it went missing — until 7 years later. Intercepting a very disturbing distress signal (a lot of screaming and weird noises going on), someone decided it was a great idea to send out a rescue team to see what happened to the ship. Headed by Capt. Miller (Fishburne), he and his team — Starck (Joely Richardson), Cooper, Justin, Peter, D.J. (hey look, it’s Jason Isaacs!), and Smith (arguably the smartest person on this mission) — head out to Neptune along with the gravity drive’s creator, Dr. Weir (Neill). They arrive, they discover things went super bad after the gravity drive activated, and now the same thing is happening to them. Seeing things, going crazy — you know, the typical stuff that happens when a place is dunked in evil and returns for a second round. Thus making it the usual game of Who Will Survive?

First off, I’d like to say that I really appreciated a lot of the things the characters did in this movie. While there are still an equally balanced number of horror movie tropes (splitting up, going alone, investigating freaky noises, etc.), oftentimes people would say or do something that would make me clap in appreciation. For example, at one point Peters, the med tech, is alone with an unconscious crew member and hears weird things. Yes, she goes to investigate, but she’s extremely cautious and picks up a bone saw for a weapon. I actually said, “Good girl!” out loud. At another point the crew is talking about the things they’ve been seeing, and when Weir is condescending and dismissive of their claims, Smith tries to attack him and rightfully so. I was even sitting there thinking, “Man, somebody punch that guy.” The entire movie Smith wants to be off the Event Horizon because he knows it’s a bad place. He makes that abundantly clear when he says, “This ship is fucked,” and maintains that he’d much rather be out in space fixing their ship, the Lewis & Clark, than be inside the Event Horizon. A man after my own heart with that kind of common sense in such a situation. (Extra points because he’s British. And was in the movie Dog Soldiers, which is a great werewolf movie if you have the time.)

Smith is tired of Weir’s shit.

Smith may have been my favorite character, but he got little airtime. Miller takes second place with his no-nonsense approach to every situation. He doesn’t want ifs, ands, or buts. He wants answers. He wants to know what’s going on. Whether his crew will be safe. Every time Weir evades or suggests something that doesn’t match up to what Miller is already aware of, he calls Weir on said bullshit. And the second he sees the video of what happened to the previous crew, there’s no discussion. He simply announces, “We’re leaving.” No trying to figure out why they got that way. No more asking Weir questions. He’s seen enough, and he is done. He even decides to go the Ripley route and blow the ship out of Neptune’s sky, his announcement followed by a resounding, “Fuck this ship!” Right on, Miller! I just loved that these characters didn’t mess around. Early on it felt like the movie tried to do a few things to make me care about them, but was pretty useless. However, their attitudes about everything is what endeared me toward them. Miller said jump, and they jumped. They all tried their damnedest to get their jobs done and none of them fell into sobbing heaps of despair. I’m not ashamed to say that I’m mad that so many of them didn’t make it. Once Miller stated his intentions about blowing the ship, anyone familiar with horror tropes knew that would be the turning point and the ship would decide it was time to hit the kill switch on these people. So yes, you can see it all coming from a mile away. But I’m pissed about Smith and how hard he worked just to get them the hell out of there, and about D.J. because he simply didn’t deserve what happened to him.

I’m also mad about Miller. Because I’m honestly not sure if he’s dead or alive. Weir, having gone to the dark side at this point, acted as though all were lost when Miller hits the detonator that blows the ship in half, effectively splitting the remainder of his crew in one part of the ship and keeping them safe while the back half gets sucked back into whatever dimensional hellhole the gravity drive sucks them into. But that’s all it does. Break the ship in half like it’s designed to do for safety purposes. Which means Weir and Miller should be fine. Maybe Weir is just mad he can’t bring more people with him liked he planned? Because he should have been dead once already, but as he states, “The ship brought me back.” So by all accounts, Miller should survive too, which means he’s stuck in the same hellhole. I don’t like this.

I mean, come on. He looks like a Cenobite.

However, I’m convinced that this is a side story set in the same universe as the Cenobites (beings from a hell-like dimension in the movie Hellraiser), and that’s where this ship is going. Weir looks remarkably like a Cenobite at the end of the movie, and given that he should be in tortuous pain but is instead gleefully happy to be partying with the ship, it doesn’t sound too far off-base. Likewise, in a recovered video the crew found, they see the Event Horizon‘s previous captain happily displaying his eyes to the camera even as he says “Save yourself from hell.” Pain and pleasure, kids, just what Cenobites are all about. So I’m assuaged about Miller going to this place because I can envision everyone’s favorite Cenobite, Pinhead, looking at Weir and Miller and asking just what the hell is going on because Miller didn’t ask to be there, didn’t solve any puzzle boxes, and dragging people in there without proper protocol isn’t their style, so they’d spit him back out and entertain themselves with Weir instead.

Not too shabby for being ’97 CGI and going to another evil dimension.

But lets move on from that. I’m surprised to say that I think a lot of the CGI holds up well here. I have seen video games of today look far less realistic than some of the elements on the ship. Good job, 1997 CGI. I also really appreciate the set designs for this movie. They’re extremely varied and highly detailed, such as the green motherboard circuitry ducts Weir visits to make repairs to the drive. It’s clear that they’re meant to evoke certain feelings, and they do a very good job of that. Though there are plenty of things on the ship that will make you think, “No one is designing a ship like that.” For example, the coffin-shaped hallways or the meat grinder-like hall leading to the gravity drive room. And why are there so many spikes in the gravity drive room?? Weir has an explanation for that one but…yeah, no. Those hallways were designed to make the audience uncomfortable. On the plus side, it all works.

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Thinking about it, I’m hard-pressed to find real problems with this movie aside from the tropes. But I’m sure most of us can agree that it’s few and far between when a movie doesn’t bang its head directly into those. Yes, there are also jump-scares (none of them worked on me due to their predictability), and I don’t know why you would design a ship like that in the first place but I’ll go with it because plot. Any other qualms I have are small, such as when Weir has to explain the whole bending of space thing to the crew (they’re piloting a spaceship that can get them to Neptune in an astonishing amount of time, but Weir has to explain faster-than-light travel possibilities to them?). No, it didn’t scare me like I guess it was supposed to, so I suppose it didn’t do it’s job, but I was still entertained and I’ve definitely seen worse films. Out of curiosity I checked Rotten Tomatoes where critics dished out a 23% but the audience rates it a 61%. I feel like this is a solid example of ignoring the critics because they’re no fun and trusting the audience instead. So go get your popcorn and watch Sam Neill lose his damn mind.

And how about we never visit Neptune?