pulp horror in space

Rating: Null/10 (21 May 2004)

I first saw Event Horizon on video cassette in the late 90s and I recently watched it again on DVD. You might find this movie in the sci-fi section of your video store, but it's really a horror story set in space.
Captain Miller and his crew are sent to investigate the mysterious reappearance of the Event Horizon, a spaceship that, a few years ago, disappeared near Neptune. That vessel was equipped with a special hyperspace drive that enabled it to travel faster than the speed of light by warping space and time. All of this is explained to the crew by Dr Weir, the inventor of this technology, who is now a member of Capt Miller's search party. Something went wrong with the Event Horizon, he says, causing the ship to vanish for seven years.
I really loved the early parts of this movie when the search party was exploring the haunted ship. The visuals of the interior of the Event Horizon are impressive. There are lots of shadowy rooms and decks connected by dim, echoing corridors. At the core of the ship there is a huge rotating ring-encircled sphere that is the source of the ship's power and it's effectively cyclopean and sinister-looking; all this made me wish I had watched this one on the big screen. Later on, one of the characters offers the conjecture that the ship may have become a living thing. This is the kind of stuff that has always excited my imagination. Sure enough, as the story moves along, genuinely creepy horrors of all kinds begin to manifest themselves.
The script contains a pot-pouri of ideas from other movies and it has plenty of flaws. Members of the crew are forced to confront ghosts and mind-manufactured frights that are reminiscent of Solaris or Galaxy of Terror. One of the characters morphs into something like one of the cenobytes from Hellraiser and starts making Pinhead-like proclamations. The captain orders his crew not to go near the suspicious core of the ship, and yet everyone seems to wander in its vicinity again and again. The last reel has some continuity errors of time and place: a couple times I was wondering how that guy could possibly end up at that place at that time. And after an interesting build-up, the story seemed to crumble; the frantic sequence of events at the end felt like a poorly contrived attempt to wrap the whole thing up.
Still, when the closing credits rolled, I found that overall I liked my experience of this film. I thought this movie did successfully create a kind of evil-from-the-void Lovecraftian feel, where the cold and vast depths of outer and inner space are full of incomprehensible horrors. There were a lot of unanswered questions and I wasn't able to figure out what the ship's motivation was, but I was okay with that. My theory about these stories is that they should operate on a more visceral level and too much explaining can get in the way and ruin the mood.
In recent years, there has been a trend in movies of this kind to self-consciously make fun of themselves - they maintain a kind of smirking ironic tone and include many one-liners in the script. I was glad that this one, for the most part, avoids this trend and instead tries to be relentlessly tense. In fact, sometimes characters in this movie speak some real silly lines in a grave and sober manner. The fact that Event Horizon takes itself seriously somehow makes it much more fun.