Event Horizon (1997)

 

Director: Paul W.S. Anderson

Screenplay: Philip Eisner

Cast: Laurence Fishburne as Captain Miller; Sam Neill as Dr. William Weir; Kathleen Quinlan as Peters, Med Tech; Joely Richardson as Lt. Starck; Richard T. Jones as Cooper; Jack Noseworthy as Justin; Jason Isaacs as D.J.; Sean Pertwee as Smith; Peter Marinker as Captain John Kilpack

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #162

 

Where we're going, we won't need eyes to see.

I hated this film. It is a film once, growing up with parents who were more lenient in letting me see adult films of a higher age rating, which had a greater aura than it does now. It is a film which has a strong aesthetic, but is a reminder that, for myself, I have become bored with the predictable tropes of American horror storytelling. I am writing this in knowledge Event Horizon had a troubled production which softens my blows a little - the original cut was over two hours, more gorier and a lot more detailed in plot by accounts. The irony is that it was not the shoot itself were the problems lay, or that it was even Event Horizon itself at all, but that James Cameron's Titanic (1997), produced by Paramount, was taking so long to finish they pushed Event Horizon to be released in a hastened post-production.

Premise wise, British director Paul W.S. Anderson comes with an intriguing idea, as a haunted house film in outer space, where a recovery team are sent for the titular spaceship, one which has an experimental warp drive that can bend dimensional space travel. Dated nowadays, as this proclaims that in 2015 we had colonised the Moon already, but still intriguing. Naturally said warp drive was not a good idea, where the catalyst of the horrors arises from, that the ship has effectively went through to Hell, bringing back all the horrors with it. The plot is, amusingly, not dissimilar to a bottom of a barrel Japanese anime called Roots Search (1986), also sci-fi horror on a space ship which disappeared only to reappear, where in that straight-to-video ("OVA") release the main characters are also tormented by ghosts of their past.

The difference is that, whilst that anime is notoriously bad, and has a gross fleshy aesthetic even in how "off" the character designs have, one of Event Horizon's virtues which I will hold high is that the production design is sumptuous, which I cannot deny, though in mind to this being depicted as an ominous hell, where the recovery team should have reconsidered their goal when the distress signal they have involves Latin being spoken aloud among screaming. I would argue that half of the film's cult status just comes from how distinct it looks when you get to the Event Horizon itself, where the warp drive is a spinning spiked ball of death you have to get to through a giant slashing blade corridor. Definately of the era, especially the techno music in the score, but like a lot of Hollywood films at the time, it felt like a last hurrah in the nineties for a lot of insanely elaborate production design, even in how the chairs in the cast's recovery ship are not on the floor but hang above on a moving arm each.

Tragically, the material, the plotting and dialogue, is utterly bland and pedestrian. Paul W.S. Anderson is a diverse figure - at one point the Vulgar Auteurist movement embraced him, where reviews even compared one of his Resident Evil sequels to Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master (2012) when they were released theatrically around the same time, but I do wonder why, as unlike a figure like Tony Scott, Anderson as a "vulgar auteur" is for me just a journeyman whose worked extensively over the years but never really developed a style from what I have seen. This is not a bad thing inherently, as that does not mean you cannot be a competent filmmaker. A lot of W.S. Anderson for me however, from the few films I have seen, like Mortal Kombat (1995) from beforehand, is that of someone who is slick and relies on his production value, which is a danger when he is the kind of director beholden to scripts, including ones like here which are not good, and is not someone I would hold as being able to manipulate them into something more.

The problem arises that the script by Philip Eisner, who would only pen another film Mutant Chronicles (2008), is insanely perfunctory; despite an almost Warhammer 40,000 sense of far flung science fiction combined with horror and other genres, a reference to a table top model game which is entensively steeped in elaborate visuals and lore, he does not here really do anything beyond character stock tropes moving generically around a plot whose twist, the ship has went through Hell, is obvious and stretched out for far too long. Anderson likewise cannot sustain the film beyond this, which is worse as this is clearly going for the Hellraiser franchise meets a space ship, ignoring that said series already had a sci-fi story in a sequel a year or so beforehand. Instead you only spend time dragging on with the characters being tormented by generic hallucinations, the only person in a surprisingly strong cast of British and American character actors, being Sam Neill, the character of the man who built the ship and is tempted by its charms, which is not surprising as between Possession (1981) and In the Mouth of Madness (1995), the great New Zealand actor knows a thing or two about going mad onscreen.

There is, frankly, a lack of ambition in the film to match that exceptional production design, and I say that cutting some slack due to the unfortunate post production history. A much more darker film is hidden - between the aftermath of someone being raised on hooks in the medical room with their guts spilt out on a table, to the obsession with removing peoples' eyes out, there was a ghoulish film here Paramount (and test audiences) to their horror funded as a big feature. One key scene, drastically censored down as footage of the original crew of the Event Horizon, is said to be effectively the shunting from Brian Yuzna's Society (1989), only with adult film actors and amputees hired in a cavalcade of sex and dismemberment, lost potentially to time unless a VHS of the director's cut or actual footage gets leaked out.

Brutally, even the attempts at darkness and emotion are even trite however, such as one of the crew members an older woman haunted by visions of her disabled son back home, or Neill's character haunted by a wife who committed suicide, none of which really stands out beyond feeling apathy and boredom. The plotting is so predictable and with a very simplistic plot that, even if the director's cut was salvaged, it would have to drastically add either more drama or a sense of horror, or both, to actually win me over these years. Instead, from the version commonly available, I was bored to tears instead.