Event Horizon: Special Collector's Edition

-Paramount (1997)

Summary

The space ship Event Horizon was mysteriously lost for seven years until it came back… chock full of ghost pirates! Well there are no ghost pirates, but that would be pretty freaking sweet.  

My Thoughts

Event Horizon has finally been released on DVD as a collector's edition so now is the perfect opportunity to catch up on a sci-fi film I missed way back in '97. One of the reasons why I haven’t seen it before this review was the fact that Paul W.S. Anderson helmed this adventure. He’s no Uwe Boll or anything, but to me Anderson’s name on a film is the red flag of mediocrity. A flag that still flies strong with Event Horizon. 

Event Horizon opens up with a few title cards that reveal that man is traveling around in our solar system with apparent ease and that the loss of the ship, the Event Horizon, was the biggest space disaster humanity has ever had. That was seven years ago. The ship has mysteriously reappeared and the crew of a rescue ship named Lewis and Clark is given the task of checking into it.  

The first thing that’s obvious is that the set design of the Lewis and Clark is taken directly from Alien along with some of the crew dynamics. The captain of the Lewis and Clark is Laurence Fishburne doing the best Laurence Fishburne impersonation I’ve ever seen. The rest of the crew is pretty ho-hum with the most notable being the young/innocent guy you know is going to get killed (His fucking nickname is Baby Bear!), the sassy black man, the British guy, and the other chick who’s not attractive enough to live through the entire film. The crew is accompanied by Dr. William Weir, played by the underappreciated Sam Neill. Dr. Weir is the designer of the Event Horizon and its sophisticated spooky drive so he has a lot at stake for discovering just what happened to the ship seven years ago. With a set up like this, you pretty much know you’re heading for some sort of spacey horror adventure.  

One thing that struck me right away was that they don't send a small military detachment with the crew to check out the ship. Even with the knowledge that the crew of the Lewis and Clark is highly skilled rescue type folks, they can’t seem to get their act together when they’re constantly under attack. Hell, they have to resort to using a glorified staple gun as a weapon. They had time to pick up the good doctor so why couldn’t they put a couple of guys with big guns on the ship with them? The message they received from the ship of screaming and the guy speaking Latin would have been enough to convince me that they might need some shotguns.  

Regardless, when the rescue team finds the Event Horizon, they discover that the crew is dead and the only clue to what happened is some creepy unwatchable video. Of course, things go wrong when the youngest Lewis and Clark crewmember, Little or Baby Bear or whatever his innocent child-like nickname is, gets sucked into the magnetic drive of the craft. Gee, I couldn’t have seen that one coming! At about the same time, all kinds of explosions rock the Event Horizon and OF COURSE the Lewis and Clark, which takes too much damage to fly until further repairs are necessary. If you’ve seen a lot of these types of films, you’ll recognize the familiar trappings laid out for the audience. Event Horizon is like a couple of other Paul W.S. Anderson films, because it’s riddled with a lot of plot clichés like the nice little ten little Indians scenario that is laid out soon after their ship is damaged.

Before I get to the really bad portions of Event Horizon, I’d like to point out the good. One of the things that this film does well is the set up for all the horror elements that are going to happen further down the road. The pacing and direction are surprisingly decent for the first half of the film and kept me invested in what was going to happen next. For awhile, I actually thought I was viewing a film helmed by a talented director. I really like the slow, bulky and somewhat more realistic view of space transportation. There are also some elements of real honest to goodness non-Hollywood sci-fi in the form of such things as the grav-couches, which I believe are inspired by the completely awesome novel The Forever War. The special effects still hold up remarkably well, except for some of the CGI shots of floating garbage, but this is a minor nitpick at best.

The film’s set design is also well done, while it is obvious that Event Horizon was heavily inspired by Alien (if not ripped off). I find it funny that the interior of the ship Event Horizon looks scary and Gothic to the point of being too scary and Gothic. I couldn’t understand the functionality of all the weird spikes, especially the completely pointless spikes on the doors. As soon as the crew started snooping around there isn't any question that the ship was doomed from the start, because of its creepy columns in the medical bay and the bizarre engravings on the ship’s magnetic drive. Wouldn’t it have been a little more frightening if Dr. Weir realized that some of these stranger aspects of the ship weren’t in the original design and it had come back “different”? Instead, we’re supposed to believe that this guy just happened to design the scariest looking ship in the universe and, coincidently, something terrible happened to it. This is exactly why I held back on having GM put gothic columns and stained glass windows in my car.

And now for the film’s major failings. Once the plot of Event Horizon kicks into high gear, it loses a lot of its momentum. There’s a twist that is sort of a surprise, yet isn’t at the same time. It mutates the film from a creepy haunted house tale to a story about the remaining crew verses a super bad guy, so in essence it became almost every other horror film I’ve ever seen. At the end there’s also a super annoying scene where one of the characters is fixing a part of the Lewis and Clark when it blows up. He ends up free floating on a chunk of the ship and makes light of his situation. It irritated me to no end that they thought it would be great to have The Funny Negro™ cracking wise about his almost imminent death.

With all these problems, I did enjoy Event Horizon somewhat. Granted there’s nothing to really set this film apart from other sci-fi adventures, but it did a good job at keeping me pretty tense throughout many of the incredibly suspenseful scenes. I just wish the later half of the film could have kept up with the earlier, more frightening set up.

Fun Fact: If you slow down the footage of the crew going crazy, it looks like a naked woman is shoving something in the ass of a naked male crewmate. Some person's hell is another person’s heaven, I guess!

The picture quality is very good, and considering most of the film is in almost complete darkness the blacks looked particularly deep. There are two 5.1 mixes with a Dolby Digital 5.1 and a DTS mix. The 5.1 was okay and did the trick. The DTS track is also pretty good and is my choice between the two as always.

Extras

This edition loses some major points right off the bat for having some trailers play before you can get to the main menu. Thankfully, you can fast forward through them, but you can’t go straight to the menu.  

The commentary track features Paul W.S. Anderson and producer Jeremy Bolt. It’s fairly informative for anyone who really digs the film, although it’s a lot more fun if you pretend that both heavily British accented film creators are in drag.  

“The Making of Event Horizon” is a documentary that’s broken up into chunks that can only be interesting for someone who likes this film a lot. Otherwise, you might find yourself bored because a lot of this stuff is repeated in the commentary track. If you’re like me, you might just want to skip to the last chapter of the doc, because it goes into a good amount of detail about the deleted scenes.  

Speaking of deleted scenes, the ones presented in the “Secrets” section are rather boring. The commentary for each one is interesting enough, but I have a suspicion that the idea that the film would be a lot better if they could make a cut a little like a false dream. 

“The Unseen Event Horizon” features a series of storyboards for an unfilmed scene with more Paul Anderson commentary if you haven’t gotten enough of that already. There’s also some conceptual art with Anderson if you can’t get enough pre-production info.  

This edition also serves up even more behind the scenes footage in the section “The Point of No Return” with even more commentary by Anderson. Jesus, does this guy ever get tired of talking? 

Finally, there are two trailers of the film. Thankfully, there's no commentary from Anderson for them. 

Score:

Film: 5.5

Extras: 8.0

Edition: 8.0 

- Paul