p e n g u i n d e v i l

What do you get if you take a ship and its crew, put them in hibernation and send them far out across space on a potential rescue mission to locate some folks who contact has been lost with? Then throw in the mystery of not telling them the whole truth about where they’re going and add some unwelcome stranger to the crew who is seemingly an “expert” (through they keep the whole story and their expertise a secret until arriving at the destination). Throw in a mysterious derelict ship and have that destination be an eerie and quiet place where some horrible violence obviously happened. And of course, have that due to some alien force that then unleashes more horrible violence upon these folks? I mean, what movie would you have aside from Aliens?

If you mix Aliens with a healthy dose of Alien, throw in some tastes of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Solaris, The Shining and Hellraiser… And then cap it off with a generally lame script, you would have this film, Event Horizon. So, yes, it comes across as terribly derivative of a whole slew of films (and not vaguely… There are many scenes here that elicit an immediate “oh, this scene is from… select other movie” reaction), but it’s not all bad. In fact, it is one of my favorite science fiction films (though it doesn’t come close to the above films… Well, except for crappy old Hellraiser. It’s certainly better than that).

Event Horizon, for all of its flaws, is a fun and creepy movie that is also a great sci-fi story. The weakness of the script isn’t too unbearable as the story is presented in a very serious fashion and the cast is generally entertaining, though the two leads didn’t really do it for me. Sam Neill is hokey as always, while Laurence Fishburne doesn’t seem to take this too seriously (who could blame him) as he puts in a rather unconvincing turn as the hard-nosed ship commander, but the others have substantial roles and the movie is pretty action packed, so those performances can easily be overlooked… Especially with all of the violence and action!

While it starts off as pretty hard science fiction, it becomes almost metaphysical as it delves into black holes, other dimensions and alien forces… And though it ends up feeling like a haunted house in space, it somehow loses none of its hard sci-fi feel or starts to come across as corny. I think that Paul Anderson does a darned good job here, especially considering that the only other movies I have seen that he directed were both utter garbage, each almost unwatchable in their hackneyed crappiness, Resident Evil and Aliens vs Predator.

Though it tales a few moments to come to terms with the influences on display here (some must have been intended as homages), and it can be a tricky beast to pull off both serious science fiction and good horror in the same film, Event Horizon has a good back-story and after a point the movie comes into its own and it all works out pretty well. As a horror movie, it definitely has good tension, some great gore and a healthy dose of the unknown. As a Science Fiction film, it has some interesting science, great looking special effects (though some of the cgi is a bit too cgi-ish), and the all-important spaceships look quite good and not hokey at all… Though there is a bit of a mixed blessing as when the rescue ship comes into contact with the Event Horizon, the huge scale of the derelict ship is quite impressive… But it oddly seems quite small on the inside…

As I mentioned in my brief coverage last year, it still does feel like a half hour had been removed. I looked it up on wikipedia today where someone, in fact, stated that 30 minutes were excised due to it being perceived as excessively gory. Though it is still quite gory, I am always bothered by ripping that much out of a completed film and it would be nice if they would have been able to put the movie back together for the DVD. The added gore would be fun and I’m sure it would help out the movie with that strange sense of incompleteness that one gets from it. All in all, it is still a highly re-watchable Sci-Fi/Horror film.