Event Horizon

Excellent movie for its time. Getting it physical still feels better than hunting for it across multiple streaming services.

Short story long, I was returning a Call of Cthulhu product via my local Staples, and the guy behind the counter joked about needing to make a sanity roll. Then he got to saying he liked CofC’s handling of madness, but also liked some other system he had used running a game that involved the stern of the Event Horizon. Had I seen the movie Event Horizon, starting Lawrence Fishburne and whoever else? Well it’s great. A little gory. Gory like Alien, I ask, or like the (horrible) Saw movies? More like Alien (bloodier, but less scary). Anyway I used my refund to buy the movie Event Horizon, got it yesterday, and watched it this evening. It was really very good: good pacing, acting (mostly; one dud moment), effects, plot, cinematography, music, everything. But despite a lifetime around sci fi and other geeks I’d never heard of it. I came here to write a review, thinking this was a great unknown movie, and I see it’s a cult classic. So, unless you can’t stand cuts or people with their eyes removed, or hate suspense, or will have an aneurysm if you hear one more person explain ftl travel by pushing a pencil through a folded piece of paper, get this movie and watch it. Wait, no, there is a very short scene of a shirtless woman committing suicide by slitting her wrist in a bathtub. That’s upsetting to see. But it’s such a short scene you can easily glance away (the nudity is momentary; the suicide is 5 seconds or so). Despite that though it’s an outstandingly good space movie, definitely one I’ll be viewing again, and one that I’d show friends.

Before I go off reviewing this cult classic, I'll share my personal history with this movie, which dates back nearly eleven years ago. I remember finishing up the forth grade back in June of 1998 and my brother rented Event Horizon from the local video store at the time and I watched it with him. When it was over, I was scared s***less the whole summer break. Oddly enough, I kept watching the movie throughout the summer, despite the fact that it was the most terrifying movie I've ever seen (and remains so to this day). I remember everyday from that summer, constantly fearing that a deranged Dr. Weir would break into my room and ritualistically end my existence. Even worse, I vividly remember my brother reenacting the infamous "video transmission" scene by holding golf balls covered in fake blood (to look like eyeballs) and covered himself with fake blood as he was saying "Liberate tutame ex inferis." Summer break eventually ended and with school starting up, I was finally able to dispose any memories I had of the movie. Sam Neill advertised for MCI at the time and even though I knew it wasn't really Dr. Weir, I still freaked out at the sight of those commercials. I would stay away from this movie for about seven years. In March of 2005, me and my friends held a "movie night" at my best friend's place over the weekend and I quickly saw Event Horizon on the video store shelf and I told my friends "You want to see a really messed up movie? Watch this." We rented Event Horizon and all of the deliciously evil and terrifying memories flooded back to my head that night; I couldn't sleep for days. PLOT: For those of you new to Event Horizon, here's the lowdown. In the year 2040, a space ship called the Event Horizon was launched to reach Proxima Centauri (Earth's nearest star) by using an artificial dimensional gateway to create a black hole, bridging the two points in space to drastically reduce journey time. When the ship goes about on its mission, it disappears without a trace. It's currently 2047 and the Event Horizon has returned off the orbit of Neptune. The Lewis and Clark rescue shuttle is dispatched to investigate and salvage the ship. As the Lewis and Clark docks with the Event Horizon and the rescue crew probes the ship, things start to go awry. SETTING: To me, this is the perfectly executed sci-fi/horror hybrid movie. Why? Event Horizon has many things going for it, but one of the best aspects is the perfect setting. Think about it; not only does the Event Horizon have a creepy gothic interior, the ship itself is surrounded by stormy conditions in space, you're stranded because your boarding ship was heavily damaged, the Event Horizon's communication functions are shot (not able to contact for help), and the only transmission you have of the ship's original crew truly sounds like screams out of hell. If you were aboard the Event Horizon, wouldn't you be scared? I sure would!! CHARACTERS: The actors do an excellent job with their roles; particularly Lawrence Fishburne as Captain Miller, Sam Neill as Dr. Weir, Kathleen Quinlan as Lt. Peters, and Jason Isaacs as D.J. To me, Dr. Weir is one of the best and most evil villains I've ever seen in film; so much so, I had to namedrop him on my review of Morbid Angel's "Altars of Madness" to describe how evil that album is. Dr. Weir isn't some one-dimensional character that's evil and nothing else; he was originally a man of scientific ambition with his Event Horizon project but his work would cause his wife, Claire, to commit suicide from loneliness. This would haunt Weir and when he boards his long lost creation, it would mentally torment him with his sins and drive him into a state of evil madness. Even prior to Weir's transformation as the antagonist, you can tell there was something messed up about him when he's aboard the Lewis and Clark, playing an intercepted transmission from the Event Horizon with a straight face, despite it sounding so hellish. Lt. Peters and Captain Miller also have interesting back stories involving Peters having to abandon her crippled son and Miller having to abandon one of his crew members on a burning space ship several years prior. Along with Weir's sins, the Event Horizon would use the sins of Miller and Peters to torment them. Rescue tech Cooper (Richard T. Jones) does a good job at providing a little humor in the movie to keep the audience from spiraling into states of madness; I particularly like him telling X.O. Starck as he was giving crew members coffee "Want something hot and black inside you?" SCARE TACTICS AND OTHER NASTY STUFF: Unlike most horror movies that use cliché settings and scare tactics to unnerve the audience, this uses much more original ideas to scare movie fans. In Event Horizon, there's no boogeyman, no hideous aliens, and not even any physical life forms on it!! The thing that makes this movie so scary is that it perfectly utilizes the whole "fear of the unknown" concept as no one investigating the ship knows what they're dealing with. Paul Anderson's interpretation of hell is also more original, making it more unnerving. The cliché fire and brimstone imagery has been replaced with the ship's gravity drive deck filled with some of the most horrendous looking corpses ever put on film. This brings me to my next point. There's lots of gore in this movie, but unlike mediocre flicks like Hostel and The Hills Have Eyes, the gore in this movie is used to enhance the dark, unnerving atmosphere of the movie rather than relying solely on it. In other words, the violence in this movie won't bore you. The violence in this movie REALLY is disturbing; the scene where Starck and Peters unscramble the video in the ship's computer showing the original crew killing and eating each other still freaks me out to this day. The scene where Dr. Weir attacks D.J. on the medical deck is really appalling as you can see Dr. Weir's bloody, empty eye sockets and the way he kills D.J. is guaranteed to freak out movie goers. As Weir and Miller duke it out toward the end, Weir forces Miller to see Hell and trust me, it really is terrifying. THEMES AND ESOTERIC THINGS: Religion is a big theme in Event Horizon, as you can already tell with the constant mention of Hell and the use of Latin in some scenes. The concept of creating artifical black holes to reduce time in space travel is really neat; I just hope I'm dead before technology advances that far!! Something that I really enjoyed was when D.J.'s carcass is shown in the medical deck, there's lots of esoteric occult symbols painted everywhere. I'm really glad that Anderson didn't use something typical like the pentagram and inverted cross to represent Hell, and the mysterious nature of these creepy symbols adds to the terror in this movie. These symbols would also appear on Dr. Weir's body when he comes back as some sort of undead creature towards the end of the movie. Everything in Event Horizon isn't tied up in a neat little bow, there's several little things that aren't fully explained. I normally don't like it when movies do this as it usually comes off as laziness, but it works for Event Horizon because they do it in a manner that satisfies the viewer at the end of the movie but makes them wonder about other things. For one, you never really see the "chaos dimension," only images of people getting horribly killed aboard the Event Horizon. So that leaves your imagination to decide what this dimension really looks like. SOUNDTRACK: For the most part, the soundtrack is magnificent; it perfectly fuses hard techno beats with chilling classical orchestra melodies. The weird combination perfectly suits the movie. The only music track I hated was the one at the very end by The Prodigies called "Funky S***," it sounds bad and fits nowhere in the movie, even though it was only on the credits. EXTRAS: The current edition of Event Horizon has a second disk full of bonus features. While these features aren't as abundant as say those in the T2: Extreme Edition DVD set, they are worthwhile. There's featurettes about the making of Event Horizon along with videos of concept art. While I liked the conceptual drawings and 3D renderings provided in the DVD set, they could have added more and I would have preferred that each image was presented as a still frame rather than a video montage with commentary because with DVD programs like Cyberlink Power DVD that include "snapshot" features, I like to make "snapshots" of these art pieces so that I can quickly get ideas when I hit the drawing boards for my own creations. Still, I enjoyed what I got in this area. The "making of" featurettes are a real treat, they show the numerous difficulties filming the movie and the neat props and filming techniques used to make this film possible. After watching these, I wasn't too pleased at Paramount for terribly rushing Paul Anderson and his crew to finish Event Horizon at a certain deadline. These corporate slimeballs would also force Anderson to cut out about 40 minutes of the original edition of the movie because test audiences were too freaked out by the level of violence in it. Some scenes were put on the bonus disk, and while pretty satisfying to see, it's a shame that they couldn't be restored into the film itself. However, given that Event Horizon came out before the DVD revolution and that Paramount wasn't too pleased by the film's poor performance in the box office, the uncut editions of the movie have been lost. Infact, Anderson stated he had to go all over the world to find the lost footage included on the DVD. In short, I can't blame Anderson for this shortcoming as the blame really belongs to Paramount for their unrealistic time demands and the wimpy test audiences for their squeamishness. All in all, the bonus disk is a nice addition to the movie. CRITICISM: The only bad thing I can say about Event Horizon was the song played at the end credits, which I already stated under "soundtracks." This is only noticeable flaw that I could find in this movie, but it doesn't really detract the quality of the film as a whole. Apparently, a lot of people panned this movie for being too violent and scary. That's mind-bogglingly stupid; panning an R-rated sci-fi/horror movie for being scary and violent is like panning The Ren and Stimpy Show or The Simpsons for making people laugh. For the people who didn't like the movie for these aspects, what were you expecting this to be? A family film about Shaqulle O' Neal in space rapping and playing basketball with aliens? Do your homework next time, there's ratings and content descriptions on the movie posters and DVD cases, READ THEM!! FINAL WORD: In Paul Anderson's filmography, Event Horizon is easily his crowning jewel. It's really sad that he'd sink to such low levels in making such junk like Alien vs Predator and Resident Evil. Event Horizon isn't a movie for everyone, but if you want a movie that will give you nightmares and weird things to discuss with fellow cinema buffs, Event Horizon will reward you greatly.

It's been awhile since I've seen this, I forgot a lot of it. But the 4k transfer really brought out the details. It's a pretty disturbing script to some, but the script is good and the acting is great.

Interesting classic

Less of a sci-fi horror and more of a horror set in space, this 1997 gem featuring Sam Neil, Lawrence Fishburne and Jason Isaacs is one of the few Paul W.S Anderson movies not to feature Milla Jovovich and not be based on a video game franchise. Perhaps best known for the deleted "blood orgy" scene, this movie draws comparisons with "Galaxy of Terror (1981)" and even shares similarities with "The Coverfield Paradox (2018). In the end, it is neither, but it is absolutely an entertaining watch that occasionally gives the squeamish a reason to leave the room. Great performances from Neil and Fishburne, this troubled movie did not do well in theatres but has gathered a cult following and earned its place on the shelves of any fan who enjoys space horror, or what other Anderson movies could be.

Great story with many surprises. Was a little graphic during scary scenes but overall great theatrics. Recommend highly.

My favorite mind altering horror film on an awesome format that has the best aspects of both blu ray and dvd without alot of the problems that both formats suffer from

Moins bien que dans mon souvenir, mais film pas mal tout de même...

One of my favourite SCIFI films (and I still haven't quite understood the end, but don't care). Having the DVD I wanted the HD version and it really is terrific - clear crisp picture, colour, sound, and good subtitles. I am not an "extras" fan, but they look interesting. Sam Neill is second billed, but it really his character's film. He slowly descends into ...well, no spoilers. The setting of the "Event Horizon" vessel and the search and rescue one are impressive as are the small well cast er cast., particularly Quinlan though Richardson looks a bit uncomfortable on occasion. The plot hurtles along even though not a lot happens until the crew reach the EH. The desighner of the gateway (and the whole film) deserves praise. A bit grim and not really family friendly, but definitely one of the great unrecogniseed Sci Fi films....

Excellent upgrade from DVD & Blu-ray

Le plus beau film de vaisseau hanté.un très bon film.bien réalisé,très prenant.quelques miments de flippe tŕès sympa

音声はドルビーアトモスではないので星4つですが、この4k輸入版の音声は良かったです👌画像もドルビービジョンで一皮剥けて良し👌