Yes, yes, I know. This came out in 1997, almost 20 years ago. But it's the first time I saw it, and it's my blog. Deal with it.
Event Horizon starts off in 2047, where the ship of the same name went mysteriously missing near Neptune. It was supposed to be testing a faster-than-light drive and went silent. The Lewis and Clark, a rescue vessel captained by Miller (Laurence Fishburne) is dispatched to find her. She has an extra crewman, Dr. Weir (Sam Neill), who designed the Event Horizon. They find the ship and the crew missing, but a message was received on Earth of horrible screaming and someone in Latin saying "Save yourself from Hell." It turns out the Event Horizon travels by folding space, much like the movie Interstellar. But when it folded space, it ripped open a dimensional portal to Hell, and the original crew was slaughtered in gruesome ways. Now that evil is going after the crew of the Lewis and Clark. Hellish mayhem ensues.
Two years before The Matrix, all we had was Laurence Fishburne mugging for the camera. Usually a mashup of two genres can be disastrous, but Event Horizon was surprisingly good. It only goes off the rails at the end, but the buildup to that end is quite good. There is an unrelenting sense of foreboding on the film, as more and more clues to the crew's horrible fate unwind. It loses me at the end, because the amount of scenery chewing by both Fishburne and Neill reaches Shatner-Ian heights. Indeed, Fishburne especially plays his "enunciative tough-guy cool" a little too much here, to the point of becoming distracting. Ever since Neill played the Antichrist in Omen 3: The Final Conflict, he has become the go-to guy for increasingly unhinged bug-eyed exposition, and he does not disappoint here. Unfortunately, I get the feeling he wants to be somewhere else the whole time. He is actually a good actor, and tends to uplift whatever he is in, but has been stuck in dreck roles for a long time. You look at his eyes and imagine him thinking, "How did I end up here? I'm pretty good. Why do I keep getting crap like this?"
The movie's atmosphere is great. Combining sci-fi and horror is a tricky business because both deal with fantastical themes. When you double down on that, you run the risk of a miscalculation and overshooting. You get Plan 9 From Outer Space or Jason Goes To Hell. But occasionally you get a happy medium like Alien. Event Horizon falls in the middle, tipping towards the good side. There's a lot to like here and there is a lot of crap. But ultimately, it kept my attention. Was it as good as people have made it out to be? No, but I did enjoy the ride.
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