Twenty-five years ago I took the woman I was dating to see Event Horizon. About half way through
she decided that we had to nope out. It was too intense, and too scary for her.
Despite this, I married her. I went to see the movie on my own the next day. The
film was a delight from start to finish.
Now, the film has been released in an extraordinary 4k
limited edition set.
I, of course, pre-ordered the moment it became available
then waited like a kid waiting for Christmas morning. Friends, it has arrived.
To my shock, my wife suggested that we watch it together.
About half way through she turned to me and said: “He’s Nicholson and this is
just The Shining in space, right?”
She isn’t wrong. People describe Event Horizon in a variety
of ways: Lovecraftian. Cosmic horror in the cosmos. Hellraiser in space.
Solaris but evil. Really though, it’s a gory haunted house story on a space
ship.
The Event Horizon is a large ship that was meant to use a
new kind of “gravity drive” to arglebargle sciency words until it creates a
singularity which somehow “folds space” allowing to move faster than light. It
doesn’t sound silly while you’re watching it. The vessel was supposed to make a
quick trip to Proxima Centauri and back. It flew out to Neptune, turned on the
scifi engine and vanished.
Seven years later a garbled transmission is received. It
appears to be a distress call from the Event Horizon which is now in a decaying
orbit around Neptune.
The rescue ship Lewis and Clark is sent to retrieve any
living crew and tow back the ship if possible.
Laurence Fishburne (The Matrix) plays Captain Miller. The Lewis and
Clark is his boat. Dr. William Weir,
played by Sam Neil (In the Mouth of Madness) is along because he designed the
gravity drive and is the expert on board.
Jason Isaacs plays the ship’s doctor and Latin translator for some
reason. He believes that a voice in the distress signal is saying “liberate me”,
or save me.
Basically the instant they get to the derelict ship, stuff
starts getting weird. People begin having hallucinations or visions, often of
real events or people from their pasts. Weir sees his dead wife, Peters (Kathleen Quinlan) sees her son,
Miller sees a man he left to burn to death on an earlier mission. The ship is a mess. Parts of dead bodies
float around, there’s blood, the place needs a serious scrubbing. They locate a
captain’s video log which consists of
the crew tearing each other apart: eye ripping, disemboweling, some light
cannibalism. It is, to say the very least, a bad vibe.
The gravity drive turns itself on, a young crew member (he
has a name, but damn it he’s “Baby Bear”) gets sucked through a portal then
comes back comatose.
The Lewis and Clark gets damaged, forcing everyone onto the
horizon.
Baby Bear wakes up, tells everyone that they are fucked,
then tries to blast himself out of the air lock.
Eventually Weir goes full Jack Torrance and when told that
they have to go home insists “I m home”. Right after that he removes his own
eyes, sabotages the ship, turns the doctor into a blood eagle and does a bunch
of super creepy shit.
It seems that the Event Horizon didn’t go to Proxima
Centauri. Instead it ripped a hole in space time and travelled to a dimension
of pure chaos. It brought something back with it.
The ending, which I won’t spoil here, leaves open the possibility
that the nightmare may not be over.
This film is just almost perfect. Paul W.S. Anderson (who
may or may not be Paul Thomas Anderson and Wes Anderson is a horse suit) would
go on to make light weight fare like the Resident Evil movies (which should have
been made by George A. Romero, but that’s for another day). This movie is his
masterpiece.
The 25th Anniversary limited edition is a thing
of beauty and perfection. The 4K transfer is beautiful. This film has never
looked so amazing. The sound is crisp and sharp. The special features are
plentiful. And the packaging is an artwork on its own.
Be sure to check out Bloodfest the podcast
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