Event Horizon

I recently watched "Event Horizon" again. I have always enjoyed this movie. I saw it in theaters in 1997 but I did not understand the movie as well as I do after more viewings. I think this is the main drawback to the movie. There is a lot of complexity to the story that is hard to take in. I really enjoy the characters and the acting is really strong. I like the interplay of the characters as well. The effects are mostly believable and the score is effective. This is one of my favorite horror, sci-fi crossovers. I hope the lost footage of this movie is someday recovered.

Event Horizon has a good setup but it's unfortunately a disappointing sci-fi horror. Most of the characters have no depth and it's almost entirely reliant on jump scares. The cg is awful and the ending is abrupt. It's also very derivative. However, it still has some positives, the music by Michael Kamen is really good and Sam Neill and Laurence Fishburne give good performances despite their one dimensional characters. The set design and practical effects are impressive but are also extremely derivative of Alien.

I picked this up to watch after seeing it pop up on numerous "must watch" scary movie lists. And it is scary... but not like momentously scary. The Event Horizon is a ship that basically is a haunted house in space! And the crew sent out to rescue it has to battle those 'haunts' and try to get back alive. I think this would have been much scarier on the big screen, but I will say that the special effects sure hold up for a movie from 1997! Overall, I'm glad I watched it, but I would not give it an "all-time" scary ranking at all.

"Event Horizon" is the sort of movie that could have come out very neat. Granted, there have been a number of movies about a mission in outer space finding something unusual, but they still could have done something interesting with it. Well, guess what? They tried to do something interesting with it, and the movie ended up making little sense. For starters, the whole part about bending space was clearly ripped off from Madeline L'Engle's novel "A Wrinkle in Time". But even beyond that, there was so much that they could have done that they didn't do. All in all, we can affirm that although the director has a name similar to the director of "Boogie Nights" and "Magnolia", it's clearly a different person. And it goes without saying that Laurence Fishburne, Sam Neill and Kathleen Quinlan have all done much better than this. Jason Isaacs would later do better as Lucius Malfoy in the "Harry Potter" movies.

This movie feels like a random collection of images and plot fragments: 2010: Odyssey II and Aliens (Boarding mysteriously deserted spaceship), The "Doom" and "Quake" video games: (Experimental warp technology linking spaceship to hell), Large baffling sphere (Crichton's novel "Sphere"), and numerous other betrayals point to a lack of original imagination. The suspense meter barely lifts off the zero mark throughout the movie.

They managed to get a couple of good actors and some serious funding. This, however, isn't enough to make a good movie, apparently. Which is sad, cause this one could have been great! At first, the movie seems like it can go somewhere. But it doesn't. It gets weird and complicated. No higher than a four I'm afraid...