Alien meets The Shining Near the Event Horizon

Rating: 6/10 (25 October 2010)

"Hell is only a word. The reality is much, much worse." -- Dr. Weir (Sam Neill)
Evidently, there's not a lot left that you can do in science fiction and horror, so if you're going to steal, why not steal from the best?
Event Horizon, from director Paul Anderson (the Resident Evil franchise), opens with a blue collar crew (like the guys in Alien) on their way to rendezvous with a missing spaceship lost under mysterious circumstances (like in 2010). Along for the ride with Captain Laurence Fishburne (The Matrix) and officers Joely Richardson (Nell) and Kathleen Quinlan (Apollo XIII) is Sam Neil (Jurassic Park) as the mysterious Professor Weir, designer of the titular Event Horizon, the first vessel to attempt faster-than-light travel, and who evidently forgot the "D" at the end of his name. Weir's revolutionary gravity drive is the same type of spinning, concentric hoola hoops that propelled Jody Foster in Contact, reinterpreted in massive black steel, in keeping with director Anderson's techno-medieval design scheme.
The plot line is timely, as NASA just announced a research directive to determine if there actually is any reasonable possibility of interstellar travel, which involves exotic technologies to shear the fabric of the space-time continuum. Unlike the folks in Star Trek who blithely engage their warp drive at the drop of a helmet, the unfortunate crew of the Event Horizon has discovered that removing one's self from the comfortable environment of matter, energy, time and space leads to a chaotic dimension which may or may not be Hell. Consequently, the rescue team enters a ghost ship connected to that Otherwhere by its warp engine, which now pulses and throbs like a living thing. But, when Professor Weir is possessed (like Jack Nicholson in The Shining), he becomes obsessed with dragging Captain Fishburne and the others back down the maw of the infernal singularity, while I wondered, "Didn't I see this same plot in Disney's space bomb, The Black Hole?"
Even though its production design borrows liberally and probably unavoidably from Alien and its sequels, Event Horizon is more like The Shining because there aren't any monsters jumping through the airlock. Its terror is more psychological as the malevolent ship, a place imbued with evil, much like the Overlook Hotel, tries to trick its hapless victims into joining it for a return cruise to Hell by playing on their innermost fears and guilts.
The cast gives it their all, but never achieves quite the audience identification factor that Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, Yaphet Kotto and their co-stars did in Alien. The film attempts to be scientifically plausible, although it pretends, like all science fiction except 2001, that spaceships have gravity. Like that concession to physical logic, the film is also obliged to send its characters off by themselves so they can be picked off one by one. And just when you think you've pegged it as Alien meets The Shining meets The Black Hole, suddenly a character turns up in make-up inspired by Pinhead in the Hellraiser series, spouting the same sadomasochistic bull about how, when you're separated from matter and energy, pain and terror become the most intense sensations, creepy sentiments also expressed in director Stuart Gordon's From Beyond.
But even though it's derivative of just about everything, Event Horizon is still entertainingly scary, although the most frightening aspect may be the sound track's ability to spike from near silence to overdrive, like Captain Fishburne just gave the order for "Maximum decibels!" Hey, you have to love a horror movie that can use as its title track a high-energy dance song called "Funky S--t!"