Made of Whatever Materials at Hand

Rating: 7/10 (30 May 2010)

Event Horizon is a bustling makeshift handiwork made secure by impressive production design and performances from actors who aren't easily embarrassed, but it begins with panache. It has the nuanced space vessels moving grandly against the domain of stars, it has the abysmal roar of the massive generators, it has sets boasting convincing technology, and it even has those high-pitched, jabbering, hardly discernible voice-like noises that remind us of Alien and 2001: A Space Odyssey, which give you the eerie sense that tiny creatures are plotting against you. The year is 2047. A rescue mission has been sent to Neptune's proximity, where seven years earlier the titular deep space research vessel vanished. As the rescue ship Lewis and Clark nears, its transmitters read that the temperature on board the other ship is freezing. No indication of human life is recognized. But there are signs of some other sort of life all through the ship. I love movies like this. I enjoy the dated fine points. Case in point: Everybody on board the rescue ship smokes, which is improbable in 2047 on a deep space mission where, later, the carbon dioxide air scrubbers will perform a vital function. And the captain, Laurence Fishburne, wears a leather bomber jacket, bespeaking that Neiman Marcus remains booming decades from now. I liked all of that stuff, though there wasn't much import to it.
What happened to the ship named Event Horizon? Scientist Sam Neill might know. He created the ship's gravity drive, which candidly resembles a minor variation on the Machine in Contact, with three metal rings gyrating around an axis. The drive supposedly conceives a black hole and then sucks the ship through it, so that it can travel astronomical reaches in a second. Neill gives the binding junior high lecture on this process, taking a piece of paper and showing you how far it is from one side to the other, and then folding it in half so that the two edges meet, describing how that occurs when space bends. The crew members nod, observing sternly. They're an exceptionally qualified space crew, on a mission where space and time are livelihood, although they seem to know less about quantum theory than most of us home entertainment couch potatoes do. It's back to Physics 101 for them. They're more like a mix of marine caricatures, as is the case with the zealous and scripted deliveries by Kathleen Quinlan and Joely Richardson, and even buddy cop foils, as is the unfortunate case for Richard T. Jones, playing a character cursed with so many horribly retarded lines that I hold the entire cast and crew responsible for not voicing the need for another rewrite: He's even carrying on like an Eddie Murphy bit when catapulted into space at one point.
So, anyway, where did the ship go for seven years, and what occurred while it was there? Why is the first team all dead? Alas, Event Horizon is not the movie to field these issues. It's all flair, pay-off and special effects. Each scene revises the fundamentals: Early in the film the Lewis and Clark nears the Event Horizon through what I think is the tempestuous gravitational field of Neptune, with endless thunder, lightning and commotion. However as soon as those effects are taken advantage of, the remainder of the movie takes place in the tranquility of space. And although we are regaled with quite pleasant shots of Neptune, the crew members never regard the planet in astonishment, or acknowledge the remarkable spectacle that would shift any Earthling's paradigm forever. They're always so preoccupied with their obligatory, often cheesy dialogue they're heedless of their environment.
The open-faced muse for this entertaining enough sleepwalking exercise in genre expediency, by the director of Mortal Kombat, is an incomparably superior but far less accessible film, Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris, where a space station courses a colossal planet. The planet in that film is seemingly alive, and generates delusions in the minds of the space station inhabitants, making them believe they're back on Earth with their families. Same thing goes down in Event Horizon, where the crew members sublimate family members and colleagues they long for/cherish/blame themselves for the loss of, although where Tarkovsky was integrating the submerged psyche with the view of a planet as a single organism, Event Horizon exploits the figments and illusions of memory predominantly for jolts and cries of wolf, as well as distilling the antagonistic forces into a single supernatural villain stalking the ship like another Alien film.
It is declared bleakly at one point that the gravity drive is an example of humanity going too far, into reaches we should not dare. There is a charge that someone has "broken the laws of physics," and from the way it's accused you'd think perpetrators will be put in jail or charged with damages. Naturally there are no "laws" of physics, simply conclusions about the way things appear to be. What you "break," if you break anything, is no longer a law but just an outmoded view, now replaced by one that makes better sense. Soundly implanted in this movie is a mistrust of actual science. That's probably why its characters know so little about it.