1h 36m
Director: Paul W. S. Anderson

This is another film that apes the space ship crew dynamic from Aliens who we follow on a search and rescue vessel which is looking for the 'Event Horizon', an earlier ship which disappeared conducting a survey of our solar system. If you're familiar with Aliens then you'll definitely recognise some of the dialogue which is repeated almost verbatim.

There is a famous exposition dump scene at the beginning of this movie where they introduce all of the characters and essentially bring the audience up to speed with the mechanics of the 'Event Horizon' and it's drive system. Generally, telling the audience so much information in one sitting is frowned upon in writing and dribbling this information over the run time is considered the preferred method but because it's a horror, this is an expedient scene because in only a few minutes we are off to the races - no time wasted!

The Event Horizon drive will remind you a bit of the 'Lament Configuration' box from Hellraiser (1987), which is also a gateway between dimensions. This drive opens up different dimensions in space in order to facilitate faster than light travel. Opening up the hell dimension is the cause of most of the horror in this movie.

There are a lot of obvious references to other movies throughout the adventure which you'll find yourself noticing - the claustrophobic crawl space for example feels very much like that scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) where Dave is trying to shut down Hal, the ship's computer which is all in red - this crawl space is green. There's a track / zoom shot like the one from Jaws (1975) in that scene too.

After the drive mysteriously activates, the crew start to experience some fairly terrifying hallucinations which has an immediate detrimental effect on the group cohesion. It's not long before everyone starts losing their minds and we get an insight into the kind of thing that might have caused the original Event Horizon mission to fail.

Here's a scene that gives you a taster of the kind of thing you can expect in this film. Justin has lost his mind, goes to the airlock, locks himself in and presses the button to open it into space - a timer starts counting down until the decompression. Then the character regains his wits, realises his situation and begs the crew who are on the other side of the door to help him. There's nothing they can do without putting themselves in peril. I'll let you discover how that one turns out but let's just say that the writing here always tends towards the darker conclusion.

There's another Hellraiser reference when Dr. Weir goes mad, his imagined wife says to him, "I've got some wonderful things to show you". The line in Hellraiser is, “We have such sights to show you”. Dr. Weir then goes completely psychotic and starts to murder the crew in gruesome ways.

It's not long before it's heavily implied that the ship itself has been to hell and it all gets a bit weird and gory before the end. The only thing I would say is that when the narrative starts talking about hell, the audience loses track of the stakes and so the ending relies on action and horror to keep the viewers engaged.

The sets in this film are mostly quite serviceable excepting for the captain's chair which is suspended from the ceiling and wobbles a bit when he stands up which always makes me chuckle. Simple is better as they say so just put the chair on the floor you muppets!

There's a few silly things in this movie like the recorded transmission from the Event Horizon which we are told has been passed through filters by experts at Houston. D.J. immediately recognises a latin phrase - I think if it was examined by Houston they would have already noticed that don't you?

There's also some bad CGI in this film, you can tell it was a fairly new technology but if you know anything about the capability of computers at the time then you'll know that what you're seeing was really quite cutting edge.

In terms of the writing it's a bit of a Frankenstein with dialogue borrowed from several other properties and numerous obvious visual references - having said that, I didn't even notice most of these in previous viewings so I doubt it'll spoil it for most.

Still, regardless of its faults, this film has all the space elements I enjoy, low gravity moments, equipment that looks like it works, ships that seem half decent. Modern quality updates and resolution really make the green screen stuff stand out so this is one of those occasions where you might prefer to watch a lower quality version.

It's been mentioned that this film has been adopted as a bit of a prequel to the Warhammer 40k universe. The gravity drive system, the ship design (like a gothic cathedral), the space suits (like the knight armour) - a lot of things line up thematically. There's some interesting posts about it on the internet if you like the 40k universe and fancy a bit of further reading!

I usually include 5 or 6 notable actors at the top but I've done 8 for this review because Jason Isaacs is now a household name and I've got a soft spot for Sean Pertwee because I like the cut of his Jib!

Slightly floored script, janky visuals and schlocky horror, what's not to love!



Trailer: