Almost exactly ten years ago I launched a new series on The Knight Shift: Movies I've Never Seen. It's just what it suggests. I would watch a movie that until now I've not beheld before and write about it. It would be an attempt to fill in the many gaps that exist in my personal motion picture database. It would be contributing to the cultural dialogue. And it would be a lot of fun.
Well, that new series until now has had one... and only one... entry: my viewing of The Big Lebowski. And then like with so many other things at the time the wind was just lacking in my sails. It was a few months after Dad passed and I was still reeling from that. I was also trying to maintain some income as a freelance technical writer. And failing miserably at writing my book (which was only completed in the past two and a half months). Writing about movies that until now had escaped notice enough to finally view them was something I very much wanted to make a regular feature out of.
Maybe things have gotten better enough that I can commit some time toward that. It's rare that I find myself enjoying a new movie anymore. Perhaps doing this will be a good thing for me in other ways.
So in rededication of Movies I've Never Seen, here is the the second film in the series. A motion picture that I have heard various things about over the past few decades...
Event Horizon (1997)
Fifty years into the future, the rescue ship
Lewis and Clark is dispatched from Earth to investigate the sudden reappearance of the
Event Horizon. The massive starship vanished seven years earlier after embarking on humanity's first attempt to venture out beyond the confines of the solar system. Now it has been discovered, in orbit around the planet Neptune.
Captain Miller (Laurence Fishburne) and his crew have escorted Dr. William Weir (Sam Neill) - the engineer who created the Event Horizon - to the wayward vessel. They are tasked with finding out what happened to the ship and its personnel. Weir explains to his colleagues that the Event Horizon was an experimental ship designed around a gravity drive that would fold spacetime between two distant points: where a normal spacecraft would take tens of thousands of years to reach neighboring Proxima Centauri, the same voyage with such an engine would be able to be accomplished in a matter of days.
But things went wrong on the Event Horizon. The people who made it envisioned the starting point and the end point but unfortunately they didn't seem to consider what was between the two. Where the craft was going to be traveling through. And that's where the ship went to and is now back from and as the crew of the Lewis and Clark come to discover, the Event Horizon didn't return alone.
This movie is all over the place. I can understand why it has become a cult classic, for the most part. But it's too disjointed for me to really say that I love it. I like the general premise of Event Horizon the film: that a spacecraft has gone to nowhere less than Hell itself. But there was a lot missing in the execution that keeps it from being a true horror classic on par with The Thing and Alien. I did like the performances by Fishburne (before his iconic role in The Matrix and there is a little bit of Morpheus peaking out from his portrayal of Captain Miller) and Neill, still on a crest following Jurassic Park. The film also stars Sean Pertwee, who has become an actor I appreciate.
The real star of Event Horizon however is the titular spaceship. It evokes some reminiscing about the U.S.S. Cygnus, the gigantic vessel from 1979's The Black Hole. Each of these ships is in a subgenre all its own: the "haunted house in outer space". When done right it could be amazing. Unfortunately I can't think of any examples where any film has stuck the landing on that particular milieu. But design-wise the Event Horizon is certainly imposing enough of a superstructure to darken the thoughts of any who would dare trespass aboard her deck plates.
Now a few hours after having watched it, I find myself thinking that Event Horizon is a high-concept film that misses the mark. I won't say that I can't recommend it however. It's worth catching at least once, and who knows: it may interest others enough that they would want it in their own personal library of movies (please Lord let physical media last a long loooong time still, I am not ready to have everything streamed from a remote server). Director Paul S.W. Anderson swung for the fences with this movie, and it shows. And that's also admirable. This plot and execution needs a bit more finesse though. Maybe in another few years the time will be ripe for a remake, because it's certainly a notion worth visiting anew.
I believe that every film should be judged by the standards of the time it was released in, as much as anything else. As it is, 1997's Event Horizon is a model example of Nineties sci-fi filmmaking, and there is some respect to be had in that. So for anyone who considers himself or herself a scholar of that era, I will heartily suggest Event Horizon as something to complement your broader knowledge of that decade's culture.
One last thing: I had heard, several times in fact, that Event Horizon could serve as a distant-era prequel to the Warhammer 40,000 franchise. Having finally seen this movie, I can say that I absolutely understand why! Maybe Anderson needs to be extended an invitation to direct something from the upcoming Warhammer 40K projects in production at Amazon. If that happens, I definitely believe he could nail it.
