Overview
In the year 2047 a group of astronauts are sent to investigate and salvage the long lost starship "Event Horizon". The ship disappeared mysteriously 7 years before on its maiden voyage and with its return comes even more mystery as the crew of the "Lewis and Clark" discover the real truth behind its disappearance and something even more terrifying.
This 1997 space horror film’s premise is that an spaceship (called “Event Horizon”) with a revolutionary new “gravity drive” disappears on its first mission, only to mysteriously return seven years later near Neptune. A rescue/recovery mission is launched, and the film follows the fortunes of the crew of this ship as they explore the vast and seemingly empty ship.
What follows is a gore fest with no internal logic. A key to the success of horror films is that there need to be rules regarding the monster or the threat. In Alien, from which this film shamelessly steals, the monster has limits – it fears fire, for example, and so the crew of that ship (Nostromo) have at least a fighting chance against their formidable foe. Here in Event Horizon the threat has no such boundaries, and so there is no effective way to build tension. The spaceship special effects look expensive enough, and Laurence Fishburne does his best in his role as the straight-jawed ship’s captain, while Joely Richardson manages to avoid too many cliches as the female crew member in peril.
But with an essentially omnipotent and barely explained enemy the movie lacks any internal logic, so resorts to B movie gore instead. The crew make all the classic horror film mistakes – they split up rather than stay together, Sam Neill mugs his way through as the engineering expert wit a dark past, and there is even the cliche of a crew member played by Jack Noseworthy (who by the way looks ludicrously young at about 16 years old but was actually 32 years old in real life) having a close encounter with the vacuum of space but surviving, albeit a bit worse for wear.
The director’s previous film was Mortal Kombat, an adaptation of a video game, and indeed after this went on to make Resident Evil, another game to movie adaptation. I cannot imagine why anyone gave him a budget after this expensive looking shambles of a film.
