Distressingly ordinary, and too smugly self-enwrapped to scare

Rating: Null/10 (23 August 1999)

Something's wrong with this movie, right at its heart, which is a pity because most of the superficial things are fine. I hate to allegorize movie plots, but this ship really is powered by an imaginative black hole at its centre. It turns out not to have an idea in; it just sucks ideas from elsewhere, then squishes them. Several shots and one scene are lifted directly out of 'Solyaris'; the linking corridor on the Event Horizon is out of '2001', the atmosphere among the crew at the start is a slightly blander reworking of the first part of 'Alien'; there's the odd borrowing from Dante's Inferno. But this is 'Solyaris' without the philosophy (and also without the unbearable poignancy, which made the philosophy not just palatable but riveting - also without Natalya Bondarchuk, which has to be a disadvantage), '2001' without the ... well, OK, without the boring bits, 'Alien' without the alien (more or less) and without the sense of focus and perfect timing - Ridley Scott's a much better director of relatively ordinary scripts - and Dante without the poetry.
This would be fine if the film was scary, which is what it sets out to be, but it isn't. It's gory, very gory, and there are plenty of synthetic jolts, but it doesn't have that imaginative coherence that makes something fearful, because however unfamiliar the situation you can imagine being there, and you sure as hell don't want to be. 'Event Horizon' is at once too stupid and too knowing to scare. It's very self-conscious, but with a completely genre-bound self-consciousness, so that watching it never becomes any more than watching a showcase for very good production design, ticking off genre references and waiting for the next crash on the soundtrack.