so good at points that it's a shame when it isn't near the end

Rating: 6/10 (29 October 2016)

This is another of those movies I saw in pieces on TV, which frankly isn't giving Event Horizon enough of its due. It's probably the only Paul WS Anderson movie I can think of that truly deserves your attention to be WATCHED from start to finish, not looking away, not distracted, because it is aiming to be a serious science fiction movie, with some horror elements. And finally seeing it from start to finish I came to the conclusion that, yes, it is Anderson's best... and at the same time it also has derivative aspects, not inherently negative against the movie per-say, and a clever concept (a space ship that takes the emotional readings of its occupants and proceeds to f***-up and/or kill its inhabitants), but near the end it falls apart not so much in script but in execution.
So, this is good. At times, it's very good. The set-up is a mixture of, to me, Alien AND Aliens, to varying degrees (and maybe, as Roger Ebert reminded me of in his review, Solaris): Doctor Sam Neill is on a mission to go back to a vessel he had a major part in shaping, the Event Horizon, which has gone past the reach of central space command or whatnot in the orbit of Neptune, and he has made the crew of the Lewis & Clark, led by Captain Laurence Fishburne and including crew such as Jason Isaacs and Joely Richardson, to go with him to find it and what happened to the crew of the ship (there's a recording that sounds extremely distressing). I like sci-fi like this, where the characters talk salty to one another, and you get the chemistry between the characters (and actors most especially) in these early scenes. I genuinely cared what would happen to them, which is a credit to Anderson in the casting.
And this has that moment that explains how to bend/travel through space with the paper that you can poke a hole through one end to another, which is so neat! Things like that always spark my attention, and for the first half of this, as derivative as it is in some of its look and the fact that, in its way, this time the alien/aliens ARE the ship itself, it's different and compelling in how it traces the inner fears and phobias of the characters, reaql traumas (i.e. Kathleen Quinlan's disabled son), and manipulates them literally to death. That's all fine, and there's even one genuinely great, masterfully done scene where Sam Neill's doctor has a "meeting" with his dead naked wife in a bathroom. That is creepy, if not outright scary, and it ends in a cinematically satisfying shot.
But there's also a feeling that the movie could go into more, like what really *is* in that other dimension or other place the Event Horizon has been to, what it means to go into that "other" side that Sam Neill seems to know about but is cagey in revealing. More than that though is how Anderson slips the tone in the final stretch, this is what made me realize it wasn't *as* good as I was hoping for: when it finally comes to bringing some action and gore, where Fishburne has to preserve his (dwindling) crew and ship, he goes into filmmaking pyrotechnics of a sort that's distracting and moments and lines even from Neill, who is so good here, that becomes funny in an unintentional way. I found myself stifling laughter in a packed theater seeing parts of this ending (some parts are more intentionally funny, with the black astronaut who has to use his boosters to get back to the ship and says 'motherf***er' every other word, and... it feels organic to him!) and could predict so much of what was about to happen. After a set up and partial pay-off that was working and for Anderson to not have all the follow through I hoped for was a let-down.
All the same, Event Horizon represents the sort of sci-fi spectacle we don't get in theaters as much as we used to back in the 90's, and in that sense it's easy to take it for granted, how it does dig into ideas of identity and fears and what obsessions draw out of people when traumas are put to full throttle. To put it another way, this is a brainy-dumb thriller, or a dumb-brainy thriller, and it's good. Mostly. When it's trying. 6.5/10