[Note: this is a review not from me, but from my other half. He generally grudgingly tolerates my choice of films, but much prefers sci-fi, so this is one of the rare films that we both love. So I let him do the review for it.]
Event Horizon is a strange film to review. It's got a decent cast (Sam Neill, Laurence Fishburne, Joely Richardson, Jason Issacs, Sean Pertwee) but it's not part of a franchise and it's never had a sequel which is unusual in a time when it seems like sequels and reboots are the only thing Hollywood makes. Gore is used only in a few scenes, which adds to its effect and nudity is only used once. The CG is very good but also kept to a minimum.
We open with a text crawl telling us that humans have colonised the moon and mined Mars and that, in 2040, the ship “Event Horizon” was launched to explore the rim of the solar system but disappeared somewhere beyond Neptune and this, we are told, is the worst space disaster on record. Our film opens proper in 2047 and Sam Neill is having a nightmare. He gazes longingly at a photo of a woman to whom he seems to have a small shrine before he has his morning shave with a cut-throat razor (seriously? In 2047?). Establishing shots place us on a station called Daylight in low earth orbit and Neill is ordered to report to the Lewis & Clark, a search and rescue craft on a secret mission. Banter between the crew of the Lewis & Clark establishes that they do this for a living and there's nothing out beyond Neptune (obviously, this was made before the discovery of masses of trans-Neptune objects and the Kuiper belt but Pluto was still considered a planet when this was made so has it vanished?). The crew then get sealed into “grav couches”, a form of suspended animation that allows them to withstand the G-forces that come with extreme acceleration by knocking out the subject and filling the tank with some kind of liquid (this does actually make some degree of scientific sense) and, conveniently, allows the films makers to skip the boring parts of their voyage.
We pick up 56 days out from earth and Sam Neill is having another nightmare. Y'know, in 2047, you'd imagine they'd have something to treat that. His nightmare involves a woman called Clare dripping wet and telling him she's cold. Foreshadowing... He then awakens in his suspended animation tank just before it empties out its liquid. He's told how long he's been out and that it's normal for him to feel somewhat disorientated. Fishburne does his stern commander bit for a few minutes and we get a couple of minutes of chatter between the crew and introductions of the crew, none of which you need to remember because, with the exception of Neill and Fishburne, they're all stock characters. There's a briefing and Neill divulges that they're here to investigate a distress beacon that seems to be coming from the Event Horizon which disappeared seven years ago. And if that surprises you, you didn't read the title. Neill further divulges that the Event Horizon was the culmination of a secret project to create a ship capable of travelling faster than light. That sound you just head was every physicist in the world screaming in pain. FTL travel is utterly impossible. And not just “well, maybe aliens have advanced tech” impossible but stitched into the fabric of the universe impossible. There's several reasons for that but the simplest one to explain is that as objects get closer to light speed, they acquire more mass. When travelling at light speed, they would have more-or-less infinite mass. And since that would require the ship being composed of the rest of it's host universe, the ship would then be everywhere all at once and, whoops, reality just crashed and needs rebooting. This very real limit is why modern physics is investigating ways to sidestep the light-speed barrier such as wormholes (which would theoretically enable you to take a shortcut through a higher dimension and avoid having to break FTL). The crew helpfully points out this impossibility and Neill explains that the ship doesn't actually travel FTL (so why say it does?), it opens a dimensional gateway (later, he clarifies it as an artificial black hole, and somewhere, Stephen Hawking is crying) and uses that to jump to another point in space (this is why I explained wormholes a second ago). There's a technobable explanation for how it does this that, if you understand the terms involved (and I do), makes no fucking sense whatsoever but what the hell, let's go with it. Playing back the distress call gets a sound of screaming and someone saying liberate mei which, we are told, means “save me”.
Sailing through an ion storm, the Lewis & Clark finds and docks with the Event Horizon. A lifesign scan shows trace lifeforms all over the ship but for some reason, the scan can't get a lock on them so the crew go in to check it out, absent Neill who stays on-board the rescue ship to guide them. The crew confirms that thermal controls are offline, the ship is deathly cold (scientific nonsense, space isn't actually that cold) and one of the crew finds an ominous blood smear. While retrieving the ship's log, a dead body is discovered with missing eyes that, apparently, look like they've been removed by some kind of animal. Crew member Justin finds the gravity drive and is dragged through a seemingly liquid barrier in front of it.....
And that's where I'm going to leave it. Revealing any more would spoil the movie for you and this is a film you really should see. Between top-notch acting, excellent writing and superb effects (including good but not over-used CG), this is a film that takes a while to get going but once it hits it's stride, the central mystery (where has the ship been and why is it back?) draws you in deeper and deeper. Neil's quiet, under-stated performance is especially good and can be favourably compared to his performance in Jurassic Park. Fishburne is also excellent as the stern, taciturn captain.
Small postscript: Among fans of Warhammer: 40,000, there is a fan theory that this film represents mankind's first stumbling attempts to navigate the Warp. Considering what we eventually learn about the ship and where it's been, that would make a lot of sense.
[Note: there has been a long-standing urban legend centred around the Captain's Log tape; namely, that there is a much longer and even more explicit version out there somewhere. This is partially true; director Paul Anderson did shoot longer and more graphic scenes originally, but when the film recieved an NC-17 rating - effectively killing any box office sales it might have wanted to get - some scenes were edited to get the rating down to an R. However, due to various reasons, the footage edited out was mostly lost, and so there has never been a full, uncut version of the film.]
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