Terrible movie that MIGHT have been entertaining, scary, and good, as a 10 minute short film.

Rating: 1/10 (10 March 2008)

Event Horizon is a bad B-movie with a SciFi/horror mix, and it fails in every area it tries to explore.
All the characters in Event Horizon have zero personality whatsoever. There is no reason to care about any of them.
All the dialogue is terrible. It made all the characters be generic talking heads that only ever say the most necessary, obvious things, in the most mundane way possible, in addition to them having no personality.
At least Laurence Fishburne had a strong screen intensity and performs great acting (as usual), which makes him interesting to watch for that reason alone. But none of the other characters even had that, so they were completely worthless. Sometimes bad movies can be elevated by great actors that make you care about their characters even when the movie has nothing else going for it. That ability is something an actor either has or doesn't have. Laurence Fishburne has that. Other than Laurence Fishburne, none of the actors in Event Horizon have that. Like Laurence Fishburne says in the classic gangster movie, "Hoodlum": "Either you get it, or you don't". Fishburne is the only actor in Event Horizon who *gets it*. He made his screen-presence in Event Horizon compelling despite having very little to work with in terms of what his (badly) scripted lines are and the bad script in general.
Event Horizon was extremely boring and barely scary at all. Most of the "scares" come from cheesy gimmicks rather than from legitimate ways, like having a very loud crashing sound effect suddenly play when a severed hand floats into someone's space helmet.
Event Horizon didn't really need to spend 5 minutes rehashing the tired old fold space/wormhole SciFi cliché that has been done ad nauseam over and over again for approximately the past 100 years. It is also very pompous the way this movie pretends it *invented* this concept, when it certainly did not.
There are very, very few entertaining/interesting/scary minutes of screen-time are in Event Horizon. Maybe 5, at the very most. That leaves 87 minutes of boring, monotonous screen-time that is filled with nothing but pointless filler. Nothing really happens in this movie until the last 5 minutes, It does not take 92 minutes to say: "This ship broke the laws of physics, went to Hell as a result, and brought back some scary delusions/supernatural phenomenon". But Event Horizon tries to pad-out that 5 minutes worth of content into 92 minutes worth of content, and the result is the total disaster of a movie that is Event Horizon.
I understand there is a concept called "suspense", but for suspense to work there must *first* be characters worth caring about. Event Horizon doesn't have any, so claiming that all the boring filler (approximately 87 minutes of this movie's 92 minute screen-time) exists for the sake of suspense isn't going to cut it. The *only* way that Event Horizon works on any level whatsoever is as a sleep-inducing miracle cure for those who suffer from insomnia.
Even *another* universally-panned (Event Horizon was also universally-panned) SciFi/horror movie with the same theme as Event Horizon, did the same theme much, much better. That movie is called "Supernova" starring James Spader, from the year 2000. James Spader and everyone in the movie Supernova make you care about them via outstanding charisma and great acting. Event Horizon is a major step *down* from Supernova. Event Horizon is an *even poorer* rehash of what was a very poor movie in the first place. It is no surprise that Paul W.S. Anderson career would continue to consist of creating bad B-movie SciFi productions and video game movies. That is exactly what Event Horizon was. No better of a bad B-movie than any of the rest of his movies that came before and after, all of which have the same very low quality as Event Horizon.
If Event Horizon was a 10 minute short film, it could have cut all the crap and had nothing but good, solid, scary, worthwhile entertainment in it. Instead of being that, Event Horizon is a terrible movie in every respect (other than Fishburne's excellent acting), with barely 5 minutes worth of of worthwhile entertainment in it.