Unfortunate Event

A friend recently persuaded me to watch the movie Event Horizon. I hadn't heard very good things about the film, but I decided I'd give it a try anyway.

In retrospect, I should have made my friend "sell me" a whole lot harder, because this movie was everything bad I'd heard about it and then some.

Set 40 years in the future (50, at the time it was made), it tells the tale of a rescue ship dispatched to the planet Neptune to recover a spacecraft that went missing years earlier during the testing of a space-time warping form of propulsion. Strange and horrific events befall the rescuers from the moment they board the derelict, as the truth of where the ship has been all these years unfolds.

Neat setup, if a bit cliché. Unfortunately, that's only the beginning of a list of clichés so long, it feels as though the script was dealt from a deck of Sci-Fi Plot cards. Stealing from Alien, The Black Hole, 2001, The Shining, and a half dozen other superior movies, while offering nothing new or unique of its own, this movie comes off all the worse for trying to stand of the shoulders of greater movies.

Every decision in both the writing and design of the film was made solely with an eye toward what would "look cool," and whenever that flew in the face of logic (as it often does), so be it. A ship with sharp, spiky objects all over the interior on which its crew might easily be impaled? Sure. A strange distress call in Latin that no one bothers to translate before sending the rescue ship? What's your problem? Venting oxygen from your space suit to propel yourself from high Neptune orbit down into its atmosphere in a matter of minutes? I don't see what you're getting at.

The movie is as much a failure on a horror-thriller level as it is on a science fiction level. The movie never met a cheap trick it didn't like. Music stings, jump cuts, loud noises, spiraling cameras, Dutch angles... even a ham-fisted Vertigo zoom. There's an endless procession of moments to make you jump, but never a second of genuine suspense.

Laurence Fishburne, Sam Neill, and Kathleen Quinlan lead the cast. You'd expect good work from these actors, and they do give it their all. But mostly, you're just left wondering how even one of them could have been coerced into appearing in this movie. It couldn't have looked any better on the page than it did on the screen.

I can say only one good thing about the movie. Because they made all their decisions based on what would look good (rather than what would make sense), it's a very pretty movie, in a dark and moody way. The CG is laughable, even just a decade later, but the sets and lighting look fantastic. The "emperor" has clothes, as it were, and nothing else.

I rate Event Horizon a D-, and I feel almost generous in that.