How technology can send you to hell

Rating: 6/10 (26 January 2012)

To summarise this movie in a few words, it is a mix between Aliens and Hellraiser with an episode of Space 1999 thrown in. This movie is a Science-fiction horror – that means there is gore and there is lots of mention of hell and there are corpses running about. To me that is not horror, rather horror is something that makes me scared or makes me jump – this movie did neither, though I will say that it is quite suspenseful.
Simply the story is that Earth is only beginning to move into space. They have just colonised the Moon and Mars and have sent one ship out to explore the outer reaches of the solar system – it never returned. Seven years later, another ship – the Lewis and Clark, set off to find this ship.
The action of the movie is set aboard the ship The Event Horizon and is trapped in the upper atmosphere of Neptune. The visual effects are quite outstanding. When the camera zooms away from Daylight station at the beginning, a real sense of vertigo comes over the viewer. The depiction of a very stormy and wind swept upper atmosphere is quite good as well – though if it is windy then there would be atmosphere which the movie clearly states there is not. This movie also looks at going into a vacuum without a protecting suit. Some have said that the body will explode immediately – and this is possible if you still have air in your lungs. The whole spacing scene is quite gruesome.
Some of the more shocking scenes of the movie deals with the gore. As a viewer we are led to watch some very gruesome scenes – and some lead up to some even more gruesome ones, though we are spared seeing them at the last minute. This is not something that I enjoy though; gore, I find, really puts me off a movie and even though it is used to incite emotions, the emotions that tend to be incited I tend not to appreciate.
Event Horizon exploits the unknown. Like other horror movies, there is a lot of supernatural suggestions and this tends to scare people – that is if you do not truly understand the truth about this universe. It really looks at the extent of human endeavour and how our desire to become master of the universe is also bringing about our destruction. It looks at the horror of how our exploration into the unknown could release powers that we cannot control. This almost happened with Nuclear weapons, and the possibility of it going out of our hands still exist. We are destined for destruction and our greed will take us there.
Characters are interesting but really nothing to explore deeply. Captain Miller (Laurence Fishburne) is okay and so is Doctor Weir (Sam Neill). The movie does create a mystery as to their past and slowly reveals it to us. We watch as these to main characters are confronted by their fears and watch how these fears try to destroy them. Even though these characters are faced with fears, these two are really the only two that are developed. One character is tormented by her dead son but the others tend to remain shallow and unobtrusive. The rescue technician does provide for a bit of relief, but even so, the development that exists with Miller and Doctor Weir is not at all evident. One thing that I noticed is the large number of Australian accents in the movie.
Event Horizon is good if you like horror and suspense. If you are in for a simple science-fiction flick then wait for Lost in Space (not that I have seen it at the time of writing this).