REVIEW: Event Horizon

Sci-fi horror is a genre that is difficult to nail down. Genuine fear comes from the audience identifying with the characters and their predicament. This can be tough when your cast is entirely made up of futuristic space-people, but it's why something like Alien works so well (essentially a movie about a bunch of blue-collar everymen who find themselves isolated while dealing with a particularly nasty insect problem). Space seems to be a less common setting for horror movies these days, despite a wealth of potential for pants-wetting scenarios. By casting your characters into a cold, soundless void filled with god-knows-what, you'd think scares would be relatively easy to come by. Event Horizon is a film that gets very close to scratching the surface as to what I'm talking about, but is held back by its own mediocrity.

The plot concerns a group of colorful military types and engineers who are sent away on a secret mission after receiving an ominous distress signal. They bring a civilian along as an advisor, and no, this is not where the similarities to the Alien franchise end. From the cryo-pods, to the numerous ladders connecting different levels of the ship, to the various pinup posters that paper the walls of the white, modern dining area, this entire movie looks like someone wanted their movie to look just like Alien (only cheaper and without the distinct touch of H.R. Giger). Entire shots are stolen wholesale from the first Alien film, and the group of multi-ethnic crewmen aboard the Lewis and Clark come off as a cheap imitation of the Colonial Marines from James Cameron's 1986 sequel. Rather than xenomorphs, the threat in Event Horizon is much more vague and psychological in nature, as members of the rescue party begin to experience hallucinations and visions that seem intent on driving them mad; The Shining in space is a concept with legs, but the film doesn't really do anything interesting with it. There's no profound message or character study, but there is an obligatory shot of a bloody deluge flowing towards a character, as if the comparisons were too difficult to draw before.

In all seriousness though, the plot had real potential, as generic as the framework is. As explained by Dr. William Weir (Sam Neill), the Event Horizon was an experimental spacecraft designed for faster-than-light travel; thanks to a gravity drive designed by Weir, the ship would essentially rip open a singularity and use the rift as a gateway between two points in space, travelling between them instantaneously. Seven years after mysteriously disappearing during its disastrous maiden voyage, the titular ship has resurfaced around Neptune, far from any populated outpost. Naturally, some terrible things happened as a result of this flagrant violation of the laws of physics, and the rescue crew of the Lewis and Clark are sure to end up dealing with it.

The idea of crossing dimensions and the incomprehensible horrors that might lie beyond is a strong, if a bit heavy, concept for a horror movie. Done properly, it could result in something truly terrifying, on a purely psychological, cerebral level. Unfortunately, the film focuses far too much on the wrong aspects of this idea. It's all but outright stated that the Event Horizon blinked into what is essentially literally Hell. A spaceship that flies to Hell and returns as a malevolent consciousness is, put bluntly, a really stupid idea. We should know very little about where the ship has been, only left with the implication that there's something horrible on the other side. Instead, we have characters talking about how the ship is "alive" and "won't let them leave". Combining a sci-fi film with a haunted house movie worked for Alien, but that's because they didn't make the Nostromo into a literal haunted house. Conversely, while we hear far too much about what's going on, we know far too little about our actual characters and why the ship is affecting them in such a way. We understand that the ship is forcing the crew to confront their inner demons, but only a few characters have any depth to their visions. We don't know why the medical technician is seeing her son with horrible lesions on his legs and we don't know why Sam Neill feels guilty for his late wife's suicide; there's a few throwaway lines that technically act as explanations, but it's obvious that these character details should have been the true meat of the film, rather than the paper-thin set dressing that they are.

The cast is by and large forgettable. There's the spunky young guy, the single mom, the two moody British guys, blonde woman, Sam Neill, Laurence Fishburne, and black Hudson. Note how only Sam Neill and Laurence Fishburne are the only memorable ones there; Fishburne is an excellent leading man and Neill plays a great obsessive scientist (even if his disbelief that anything odd could be going on borders Mr. Magoo levels of blindness). Honestly, these two are the only things that make the movie tolerable; not that the rest of the cast is bad (though there are definitely some lousy performances here), it's just that Neill and Fishburne are the only ones with anything beyond the most basic characterization. It's only natural that one's attention is drawn to the least-wooden things in the film. This is a movie that thrives on psychological horror, yet starves the audience for any organic humanity.

Event Horizon is an interesting premise that unfortunately amounts to little more than a forgettable ripoff of better horror movies. Sure, the sets are impressive and the plot feels like it's going somewhere interesting, but the lack of rounded-out characterization, coupled with the abundance of unanswered questions, makes for an aimless experience that makes me wish I was watching Alien instead. Not exactly new ground for director Paul W.S. Anderson; like most of his work, it's a shame that a concept with this much potential turned out to be so middling and bland.