Akin to a 1950's exploitation genre movie with superb visual effects.

Rating: Null/10 (2 June 2009)

Science-fiction and horror are genres that go way back to the very origins of film itself as a means of entertainment with very little in the way of "art". It is no surprise then that both have had their fair share of encounters in the past in an attempt by studios to bring the bucks of monsters and alien fans all in the one take. The sad reality of this however is that much of the time this usually results in a story that is tepid and ultimately see-through in its exploitative nature. In fact, up until Alien which came out in the late 1970's, the horror sci-fi flick was one plagued with dead-pan or over the top acting, formulaic plots and dialogue fit to be spoken only by pieces of furniture. The reasoning behind this is simple; to get the balance between such polarising genres fit enough to overcome the hard-sell nature of each, such a movie's script needs to be intricately developed and picked apart in order to nail that fine line between crass genre movie and entertaining crossover romp.
Event Horizon which seeks to tread down the path Ridley Scott paved two decades earlier is an example of new ideas meshing with old ones; Anderson's film is a whole lot less cerebral and frightening that either of the first two alien pictures, but it is nevertheless interesting in its own light. Most of the feature takes place on board a mysterious ship that has the capability of creating black holes in order to travel vast distances of space and time in a fraction of the standard rate. The problem however is that instead of taking the ship across the galaxy or even to the other side of the universe, the Event Horizon instead creates a link to another dimension—loosely described and referred to through as "hell". Of course, the term is entirely ambiguous (and thankfully so), but the connotations are not left hanging in the imagination. Event Horizon takes blood, guts, torture and pain to high levels here, fully getting across what awaits the crew at the other side of that portal, and such moments are usually what give the film its real source of vibrancy and zest.
What doesn't work quite as well however is the clashing of science-fiction (read: spaceships, technological babble and futuristic settings) and horror which too often seem far too overt and biased towards the horror side of things. To be fair, much of the feature's greatest moments come when we as viewers are subjected to moments of rapidly quick flashes of gore and horror, but there are certain scenes laced throughout that never quite work as well. Particularly irksome are the many cliché, "what's that behind you" moments quickly followed by a cheap explosion of sound punctuated by Michael Kamen's bombastic score (which, you know, would have been fine for another Die Hard movie, but just consistently feels out of place and detractive here). This, in tow with an ending as anti-climactic, predictable and utterly un-engaging as you could possibly imagine, ends up turning an otherwise decent and claustrophobic Alien wannabe into something akin to a 1950's exploitation genre movie with superb visual effects.
To screenwriter Philip Eisner's credit, there are numerous highlights inherent to Event Horizon's story (most notably being the characters who—although a tad derivative at times—nevertheless help flesh the movie out past its 2D plotting), but a distinct lack of conviction or subtlety to the overarching plot of the proceedings inevitably hurts the production as a whole. The result is a sporadically interesting and compelling feature with stretches of ten or so minutes at a time that are practically flawless—and yet the material that binds such moments together is weak and overly bland. If there is one thing that will taken from the experience however it is the memory of its horror and fantastic visuals (captured by Adrian Biddle, who unsurprisingly enough, did the same thing for Aliens in 1986) which consistently use the elaborate sets and visual effects to convey the ideas and themes of Eisner's script aptly. So it's not terrible by any means, but for anyone but the aficionados of the horror science-fiction movie, should still be taken with a grain of scepticism.

A review by Jamie Robert Ward (http://www.invocus.net)