Event Horizon

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Event Horizon

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Event Horizon

Jack Noseworthy, Joely Richardson, Kathleen Quinlan, Laurence Fishburne, Sam Neill

A rescue crew investigates a spaceship that disappeared into a black hole and has now returned...with someone or something new on-board.

Id: 10905171

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Event Horizon Recent Reviews
  • mrpopcorn
    November 21, 2009
    mrpopcorn
    "Infinite Space - Infinite Terror"

    A rescue crew investigates a spaceship that disappeared into a black hole and has now returned...with someone or something new on-board.

    REVIEW

    In broad stro...( read more)kes, if you take "The Shining" plus "Solaris" and then add gore-a-plenty, you'll end up with a rough estimate as to what this movie is. However, that hardly does this underrated film the justice that it deserves.

    From the opening shot to the closing one there are a whole bunch of things that make this an effective horror film. There's the setting, a huge derelict spaceship. There's the question of where it has been and why the crew disappeared. There's also the question as to what made them disappear and is this thing still on board. Naturally, for there to be a movie, the answer to the latter is yes.

    An interesting thing about this film is that it plays almost like a typical slasher movie, but the catch is that there is no masked psycho with a knife. The killer is the setting itself. Then, what is possibly the most interesting thing is that the film combines straightforward horror sensationalism of gore and violence with a much more eerie and psychological terror akin to "The Shining." Both of these elements slowly build up in harmony for the climax to a very underrated and under-appreciated horror/science fiction film.
  • phubbs1
    October 21, 2009
    phubbs1
    Damn spooky film, fucking eerie as hell haha scares me in every viewing I tell ya. One or maybe the best film from Mr Anderson so far, the effects, design, lighting, cast, costumes and score are all perfect and make the film what it is....a very scary sci fi horror.

    Although it ...( read more)kinda descends into a 'Hell Raiser' type affair near the climax that just makes it even better and gets you thinking even more about the outcome, in a sense there is no happy ending here. Like most sci-fi horror's past and new the plot can be a tad confusing and unexplained here and there (Pandorum) and this film is no exception, its weird and almost dream like, a bad dream of course, which adds but also takes away some of the fun as it just made me wanna know more about what was happening and it left me alittle frustrated, but maybe thats a good thing huh

    Good films do that I guess, keep you thinking after the credits role :)
  • SirPant
    September 16, 2009
    SirPant
    Not the best film in the world but for me it's a guilty pleasure. There aren?t enough sci-fi horror films in my opinion!
  • benpuetz
    June 19, 2009
    benpuetz
    Event Horizon is an interesting movie that does a decent job of keeping your interest. It starts of with a lot of promise but ends up failing and feeling low budget in the end. Expecting a sci-fi space mystery, it turns more into a horror film. Think of this as "The Shining" in...( read more) space. There's even a scene where blood comes rushing at one of the characters, similar to when blood came rushing out of the elevator in "The Shining." I think the special effects were ok for 1989, but obviously not that good by todays standards. The acting was subpar except for Laurence Fishburne who did a decent job. Event Horizon isn't a movie I would go out of my way to see.
  • garyX
    June 3, 2009
    garyX
    Deep space exploration vessel Event Horizon reappears after disappearing seven years previously, and a rescue team is dispatched to the outer solar system to investigate. Event Horizon has a rather hokey premise; that a space ship creates a dimensional portal to hell and returns ...( read more)with an evil presence on board. Obviously, if you're not a fan of sci-fi or horror, this is a tough one to swallow, but to fans it is quite a nice marriage of Aliens style wisecracking space jockeys and Clive Barker style imagery. Visually, this film is spectacular; the production design is superb, clearly borrowing heavily from 2001 and Alien, but also some gorgeous art deco style art design. For the first hour the story builds up quite nicely with solid performances from its stars and it has some creepy, atmospheric scenes. Unfortunately the final act sees logical story telling flushed out of the nearest airlock, and it degenerates into nothing but lots of diving around in slo-mo explosions and running about in dark corridors. It's a genuine shame because the first hour is that of a 4 star film, but I'd definitely recommend fans of the genre to check it out, if only for the set design alone.
  • MisterTuttle
    January 1, 2010
    MisterTuttle
    Photobucket

    You've heard the story before. A group of astro...( read more)naut's are sent to recover a spacecraft which had been lost and aboard it is something sinister. It's the usual science fiction fair with a dash of horror involved.

    Dr. Weir created the Event Horizon. A spaceship that has a special gift which is it's core. The core of the ship is a spinning ball like reactor. When the three rings for which spin with this ball like invention come together to a stop a mini-black hole is created. This helps the ship to travel faster than the speed of light to any other galaxies in the universe.

    When a test run over shoots Horizon's destination, that's when it's found floating near Neptune. The year is 2047 and a team of astronauts who were on leave are stuck having to help Dr. Weir retrieve his spaceship. And to think, they could've had better things to do.

    A signal from the event Horizon suggests, from all the screaming, that the original crew didn't have a good time. Once they've found Horizon, they board it to find it a complete mess with very little human activity. Blood and some form of liquid is spread about. One astronaut discovers a dead body, mangled as if it were clawed by an animal. The body shatters to pieces once gravity has been turned on.

    When one of the crew discovers the core of the ship, he becomes sucked into it. He comes out of it in a strange catatonic state. His eyes are even black and he talks about how the darkness tells him things. Much of the ship begins to dig into the fears of this crew who are starting to lose their grip on their mental state. Dr. Weir's mental state, however, may already have been gone once getting back to Horizon. "I am Home," he says.

    When their fears are unleashed, they begin to drop like flies. Dead flies. Much of it's third act revolves around who ever is remaining to, well, get the hell out of dodge. So to speak. At the core of the Horizon is where much of Hell becomes unleashed and it was pretty spectacular.

    The characters aren't very important because not much is made clear about them. Reminded me of the characters in 'Sunshine'. As a matter of fact this film may very well be a distant relative and if I had to chose between which one I wanted to hang out with more I'd choose 'Sunshine'. Although, special effects wise, this film did achieve a great sense of trippy-ness. So that bodes well and even if you don't feel satisfied with it after it's over you can always have those special effects in mind the next time you watch.

    Particularly, that decompressing scene where Justin locks himself in the airlock only to be decompressed. That was intense.
  • ChimiChanga21
    December 31, 2009
    ChimiChanga21
    I spent the whole film thinking I was gonna see something scary and repulsing. But that moment never actually came.....
  • TheQueensShilling
    December 27, 2009
    TheQueensShilling
    ...( read more)







    The Event Horizon (1996)
    WRITTEN BY: Philip Eisner
    DIRECTED BY: Paul Anderson
    FEATURING: Laurence Fishburne, Sam Neill, and Kathleen Quinlan
    GENRES: SCI FI, HORROR
    TAGS: GRIM, HEAVY, DISTURBING, TWISTED
    PLOT: A star ship that can bend time goes beyond our universe and opens the door to Hell. The film features a wonderfully heavy, dark, stifling visual footprint.

    COMMENTS : Well, well it would seem that Pam has just discovered The Event Horizon and needs to tell everyone. Not exactly. I gave it a rewatch and had mixed feelings. Since almost everyone is already familiar, I'll make this quick and dirty. Not! I adore this film, but I have some issues with it.

    Similar to Hellraiser: Bloodliine , (1996), but not as slickly executed The Event Horizon is about Hell in outer space -literally. And I'm not talking about having to put up with DOS-pun cybergeek humor from your shipmates, a female astronaut's abundant long hair in your face in zero gravity, or the pains and embarrassments of the vacuum toilet. The Event Horizon takes the horror of the fire aboard the Mir and amps things up about a thousand notches.

    Sam Neill, who always does a great job at portraying sinister and sophisticated creepy people, plays Dr. William Weir, an engineer who designs a new gravity drive star ship in the future. The concept is that a special, complex 3-ringed gravity reactor core (which looks suspiciously like a glorified gyroscope) can create a mini-black hole. The resulting super gravitational field can be harnessed to fold the fabric of space. The wormhole it produces allows the ship, named The Event Horizon, to instantly travel many, many light years. It works! It works too well!

    The ship it turns out, overshot its mark and went someplace awful (Theramin music, please) and brought this awful back with it. And we're not talking rap music and Ebonics, or Harley culture and line dancing here. It went to Hell and brought Hell back. Oh, and the ship is now alive and can read your deepest fears and materialize them for you -this last one is a bold, new, highly original paradigm, that has never before been used in sci -fi or horror . . . (joking!).

    So in a nutshell, the frozen, hibernating ship is discovered seven years after it departs, drifting aimlessly and dead in the orbit of Neptune. A scout ship is sent to investigate and salvage. (The ship has to be sent, otherwise there would be no movie, just a scribbled high concept in producer Jeremy Bolt's disorganized desktop paper stack.)

    The crew of the scout ship, which includes Dr. Weir, discovers evidence that all hell broke loose on The Event Horizon and before they can get away, the ship begins to exert its evil influence on them. They start to go nuts and weird, bad things happen. Then Weir goes mad and wants to take the ship and her new crew back to hell. It starts to look as though nobody will escape the mess.

    I loved The Event Horizon but it is full of dreadful cliches. In so many of these hack space flicks, outer space is depicted as being conducive to the propagation of sound waves. The crews of multi-trillion dollar space cruisers behave like a pack of drunken teenage camp counselors at a roadhouse free-for-all. Rainbow coalition stereotypes abound. (There is usually the logical guy, the jock, the tough cookie righteous gal, the black guy engaging in minstrel show humor, the mad scientist who will sacrifice everyone for knowledge, the vapid gung-ho kid, etc. etc., This is typical of the cast in the Alien franchise and every corny space movie that came after it.

    The crew in The Event Horizon isn't quite that bad, but it still follows the cliche. They are emotional and confrontational. One of them has tattoos, that's typical of astronauts, right? The intense, street smart Laurence Fishburne is the flight commander. He'd make a believable Naval skipper, but an astronaut leader? C'mon. How about Al Gore. That would be more like it, but I suppose not as entertaining. I 'm not sure when I observe the casts in these films whether I am seeing the portrayal of astronauts or the characters from A Chorus Line. I mean all some of these flicks need to do to complete the "all walks of life" theme is add Marcy from Peanuts and a tortured nerd. But I don't want to give The Event Horizon a black eye for the extremes of other movies in this regard. While reminiscent of them, it wasn't as bad as some.

    At one point, Dr. Weir is asked to explain the ship's reactor, which leads to one of the most redeeming and interesting parts of the script -the idea of using a black hole for space travel. The explanation, while fictitious, is fascinating and of course, fairly understandable for the benefit of the movie audience. Then the crew asks him to dumb it down more. Weir does. But the answer still isn't Sesame Street Pablum enough. The black street guy (a triple Ph.D. of course) shouts at Dr. Weir in a racially stereotypical voice, "Hey Doctor, don't give me none of that physics sh*t!"

    Um, yeah. Last time I checked, most astronauts and even fighter pilots have mandatory degrees in a pertinent physical engineering field, right up to the doctoral level in some cases. These people are all about physics. Real astronauts are also carefully screened to be slow walking, slow talking, unemotional, steady nerved, calm, collected, masters of quiet understatement. They have the same patience and emotionally flat responses that the military requires of snipers, only much, much more so. In other words, they don't lose their cool in a crisis. In fact real astronauts are so logical that they seem to border on being idio-savants. This is essential to prevent fights and stupid mistakes in a closed and critical environment where one has only a single chance to do things the right way the first time. These professional technicians are responsible for handling an unfathomably expensive piece of delicate technology under precarious circumstances. By contrast the crew in The Event Horizon is a careless, impetuous and reckless mob. Out of juvenile negligence they callously cause severe damage to the craft they are in charge of salvaging.

    Astronauts are total eggheads and emotional dullards, but then a movie with a bunch of logical, boring quiet people wouldn't be very exciting would it? Yes, it would too, if Kubrick had done it. He could have made The Event Horizon a masterpiece. However this film was marketed to be a widely accessible money maker, so we get fistfights, tattoos, street talk, shouting, a rainbow coalition unisex crew, and sound in outer space. Obviously a major malfunction as far as realism and quality are concerned.

    On the other hand, the sets and special effects are absolutely fabulous for the die hard sci-fi fan. There is some use of CGI to depict weightless objects. I have no problems with CGI or any other method of achieving special effects AS LONG AS IT LOOKS REAL! CGI was well utilized in The Terminator films, but it looked like animation in some parts of The Event Horizon.

    The twp spacecraft are cavernous. This provides entertaining visual imagery, but is logically ridiculous. Room and size are an expensive liability in space. They are an unaffordable and impractical luxury.

    Furthermore, the futurists overdid the layering and surface detail. Nearly all surfaces in the sets have important looking electrical grid patterns, piping, or just plain Aztec style designs. It is visually stunning and imaginative. I loved it! But it is not realistic Neither is the idea that the crew would remain emotionally stable living in a ship that resembles a Gothic nightmare about dark, leaden, medieval torture chambers. Most of The Event Horizon's onboard bridge and crew areas look like they were designed by Vlad the Impaler.

    Furthermore, everything appears to be made of steel or iron, if not lead. A little aluminum, a lot of plastic and a generous amount of Velcro would be more like it. However unrealistic they are, the interiors are absolutely stunning, very creepy, and highly entertaining. The stills I captured will make great profile page decorations and desktop backgrounds for years to come.

    One last criticism has to do with the date in the future in which the events unfold. The story is set about 50 years from the time that the film was released. Given the fact that most of the money that could go to scientific research of all kinds is corralled instead into the coffers of the military industrial complex, the war contractors and the oil companies, try about a thousand years in the future, well past the point of civilization as we know it. (Given the fact that the US is collapsing like the Roman Empire, try never.)

    As Carl Sagan pointed out, if it had not been for the dark ages, the first star ships would now be returning. We lost 1600 years. I'd say that reasoning is about right, but for the events depicted in The Event Horizon to occur, we would also need to have governments and societies dedicated to enlightenment and not ones that reinforce their populations' stupidity for social control and profit.

    All of this aside, The Event Horizon is a must see for that handful of avowed sci-fi and horror fans who have not already gotten to it. If one can get past the cliches and stock production conventions, the redeeming factors are worthwhile. These include the production design and the imaginative concept of making a star ship that can fold space by creating its own black-hole. The idea that The Event Horizon overshot its destination, went to Hell, then brought Hell back is a bonus, if not a variation of an idea used the previous year in Hellraiser: Bloodline. The story is rife with suspense, horror, and captivating twists and turns. A number of bizarre and colorful incidents keep the viewer squirming and attentive.




    "This ship has been beyond the boundaries of our universe, of
    known scientific realities. Who knows where its been, what it's
    seen...and what it's brought back with it?

    "Where we're going we won't need eyes to see. I created the
    Event Horizon to reach the stars, but she's gone much much
    farther than that. She tore a hole in our universe, a gateway to
    another dimension. A dimension of pure chaos. Pure evil. When she
    crossed over she was just a ship . . . but when she came back, she
    was alive. Look at her, Miller. Isn't she beautiful?" -Dr. Weir.










    Anatomy of a Black Hole and The Event Horizon - CLICK TO VIEW



    3 of 6 different documentaries about the Universe and Us, comment by Sam Neill. - CLICK TO PLAY



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  • eryri
    December 18, 2009
    eryri
    A nice horror movie set in space. Interesting plot and great performances from the cast.
  • MovieGuruDude72
    December 17, 2009
    MovieGuruDude72
    After a second viewing I started to warm up to it a little. This film did have some decent suspense obviously inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey. In fact if Kubrick would have done this as his final movie instead of Eyes Wide Shut he might've made this memorable. A decent cast wit...( read more)h Sam Neill and Laurence Fishburne. Some creepy-trippy parts and some interesting science-fiction writing going on here. Worth a viewing if you love the genre.
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