This is Techno Horror!

Rating: 8/10 (6 April 2012)

Event Horizon is a perfect ensemble collaboration of talent, which takes the basic elements of separate genre legends such as Aliens and The Shining. Essentially it's a clash of religion and science and I suppose what might have happened had they merged Aliens with The Shining.
Director Paul W.S. Anderson (Resident Evil) and writer Philip Eisner (The Mutant Chronicles) made their finest ever film with Event Horizon, the story of a rescue and salvage ship crew employed by Dr Weir, the first scientist to create inter-dimensional space travel, whose titular spaceship sent out a distress call before disappearing into oblivion.
The ship has returned and is floating dead in space just outside of Jupiter's atmosphere, its crew has vanished. Captain Miller (Lawrence Fishburne) and his crew, board the ship only to discover the remains of the doomed Event Horizon's crew and to begin salvaging disturbing evidence that the ship - which itself begins to show signs of life - may have traveled to someplace beyond just another dimension.
Firstly, I was surprised over time to learn of the writer and director's separate careers. According to IMDb, Philip Eisner hasn't worked since The Mutant Chronicles and I'm not surprised. It was awful. I only watched it because I generally like Thomas Jane's films and it seemed like a good watch just by the trailer.
The only other film I really liked from Anderson meanwhile was Death Race. I wish he'd just let Resident Evil die and not come back like the retarded zombies it's all about. Bullet to the head and bye-bye, baby!
What makes their first effort work here is the minimalist attitude towards the horror element and the amount of work put into the element of suspense and character building. Otherwise it's down to the clean and safely used CGI and set-pieces and overall, the actors.
Lawrence Fishburne who hadn't made a great film up until then since King of New York was a great choice for Captain Miller. He assumes control with ease and just gets the job done like every plain and ordinary working man's boss does, rather than try to shine.
Sam Neill as Dr Weir takes the reins of the troubled genius like a true theatre legend, showing why he has been one of the industry's consistently best actors since his re-emergence as a mature actor in psycho thriller Dead Calm. Here he really busts out the dramatic and hams it up to good effect when necessary, making him very much the main event, which I suppose he was meant to be.
The backing cast also consisted of some very admirable talent including fellow Brits Joely Richardson as the cold hearted and sensible Ripley-alike second in command, Jason Isaacs as the ship's medic and psychologist and genre legend Sean Pertwee as the typically English grease monkey mechanic.
The Yanks gave us legend Kathleen Quinlan as the resident med tech and Richard T. Jones and Jack Noseworthy as the salvage crew. Far from retiring to their characters' stereotypes, the actors play on it well but still develop a good rapport with each other.
As I remember one of the most impressive and surprising appearances was of the techno-punk band The Prodigy, who supplied the disturbed twisted metal connoting soundtrack. This served well in the film's overall theme and the filler tracks are suspenseful and heavily suggesting of just how crazy the film gets as it progresses.
Since Event Horizon there have been a number of similar themed runaway successes from mainstream and B-Movies alike but rather than giving the opinion that Event Horizon had followed on where genre creator Alien had given it the inspiration, Event has managed to create a genre of its own. If you haven't seen it and you have a budding horror and sci-fi classics DVD collection, this needs to be a part of it!