EVENT HORIZON
R
Paramount Pictures / Golar Productions / Impact Pictures 1997
TREVOR THE CHARACTERSCaptain Miller: Lawrence FishburneKick-ass, no nonsense Captain of the rescue vessel who literally goes to hell for his crew.
Lt Starck: Joely RichardsonSpunky Executive Officer who survives the horror…..or does she?
Dr William Weir: San NeillDesigner and builder of the
Event Horizon ~ goes apesh*t and has his eyes yanked out by his abandoned wife.
DJ: Jason IsaacsTrauma specialist who spills his guts: Quite literally.
Cooper: Richard T JonesRescue technician and the joker of the crew ~ survives with Starck and says that “We’re safe.”
Smith: Sean PertweePilot of the
Lewis & Clark ~ goes kablooiey with it.
Peters: Kathleen QuinlanMedical technician who falls heavily from grace.
Justin: Jack NoseworthyAnother crew member who goes mad: steps into an airlock without a suit as a result.
Captain John Kilpack: Peter MarinkerPrevious Latin quoting captain of the
Event Horizon ~ killed with his crew in a blood orgy on the main bridge after bad Latin pronunciation.
Claire: Holley ChantWeir’s wife who commits suicide after being abandoned by her husband ~ gets her revenge on him by ripping his eyes out.
Denny Peters: Barclay WrightAbandoned child who kills his mother when he lures her to the edge of a sheer drop.
The Burning Man / Edward Corrick: Noah HuntleyThe crew member that Miller let burn to death. Has an inflammable personality.
LESSONS LEARNEDIf thou darest to looketh upon Trevor’s underpants, verily thou shalt loseth thine eyes just as Sam Neill did.
You can still enjoy your breakfast even while upside down and in low level gravity.
Alarm noises are just as irritating in 2047 as they are now.
Entering an airlock without a spacesuit is generally considered by experts in the field to be a bad idea. Generally.
Smoking is permitted even when oxygen is running out and people are breathing CO2.
Inter space travel through black holes are conducive to abrupt spaceship blood orgies.
VHS cassettes will still be with us in 2047.
Spaceship walls can read your mind.
Abandoned wives will eventually make you see, even if they have to rip your eyes out first.
The end credits theme by Prodigy sums up my very good feelings towards this movie.
STUFF TO WATCH FOR3:46: Well, that was an interesting camera move indeed.
7:45:
RANDOM ACT OF VIOLENCE AGAINST SAM NEILL'S NECK! OW!
15:18:
RANDOM ACT OF VIOLENCE AGAINST A PRETTY CENTERFOLD!17:00: My thoughts exactly, Sean.
18:35: If that is ‘smooth sailing’, bring me the vomit bucket.
24:16: That VHS cassette floating up there contains this film’s controversial missing footage.
25:55: The use of the word hell in that sentence couldn’t be more appropriate.
32:14: She said “Hold tight” not “fall apart”, idiot!
41:44: “The……the…..dark………”
44:37: That was a remarkably correct scientific analysis indeed.
48:23: Don’t open the door to anyone or anything that knocks like that!
51.34: That reminds me of what happened to me the last time I saw my ex-girlfriend.
59:55: Yo, yo, yo: party at Trevor’s house! Seriously though, this scene made me puke.
1 hr 01: Someone’s seen
I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang, I see.
1 hr 03:
RANDOM ACT OF VIOLENCE AGAINST KATHLEEN QUINLAN'S ENTIRE BODY!1 hr 04: Why have her eyes gone totally black? Yikes!
1 hr 06:
RANDOM ACT OF VIOLENCE AGAINST SAM NEILL'S EYES!1 hr 08:
RANDOM ACT OF VIOLENCE AGAINST THE THIRD DOCTOR WHO'S SON!1 hr 10: Trevor: “Jason Isaacs, I really admire your guts.”
Jason: “Thanks, but why? Are they showing?”
Trevor: “Yep.”
1 hr 19: Someone’s been watching
The Shining too, I see.
1 hr 21: Did Sam Neill get yanked backwards through a barbed wire fence or what?
1 hr 22:
RANDOM ACT OF VIOLENCE AGAINST SAM NEILL'S HEAD!1 hr 26: Yikes….new underpants, please.
NOTABLE QUOTESWeir: “I am home…….”
Miller: "This place is a tomb."
Cooper: “That’s right, I’m back…..Oh, s**t, I can’t stop….”
Smith: "What the f**king hell was that?"
DJ: "The ship is just a hunk of metal. There's nothing odd going on."
Weir: “They’re not your crew anymore, they belong to the ship!”
Cooper: "Would you like something hot and black inside you?"
Miller: "Oh my God: what happened to your eyes?"
Weir: “Where we’re going, we won’t need eyes to see.”
Justin: "The.... the.......dark......."
Weir: "They're fine, they're fine, they're with us. You're with us."
Miller: “You miss me, you blow out the hull!”
Cooper: “Whoa, honey, honey…..you forgot your briefcase.”
Miller: "Have you ever seen fire in zero gravity? It's beautiful. It glides over everything."
Weir: “Do you see?”
Captain Kilpack: "
Liberate tutemei, ex inferis......."
Miller: "I know. To hell."
Weir: "You know nothing. Hell is just a word."
Claire: "Be with me. Forever!"
Smith: "Why can't we go to Mars, Captain? I mean: Mars has got women."
Miller: “What are you telling me? That this ship is alive?”
Justin: "What the hell is this place, Dr Weir?"
Cooper: "OOO, it's time to play spam in a can."
Miller: “Yes, I see.”
Peters: “Corpsicle…….”
Smith: "I do know one thing. This ship is f**ked."
THE PLOTAfter seven years, a pioneering spaceship long believed lost with all hands on deck, suddenly re-appears, seemingly out of nowhere and the intrepid crew of the
Lewis & Clark search and rescue ship are sent to find it, salvage the ship and rescue the crew, aided in their task by the
Event Horizon’s designer Dr William Weir ~ a character who has lost the letter
d off his surname. Traumatized by the horrific suicide of his beautiful wife, Weir joins the crew of the rescue mission, only to find himself unwelcome at the outset, and then later very much so when it becomes clear that what he has created has somehow become a killer.
The crew is a disparate one: led by the seemingly unflappable Captain Miller, a tortured soul who seeks redemption for abandoning a crew member to be burned alive on a dying ship. His executive officer Lt Starck and pilot Mr Smith stand by him, although they are understandably peeved at having been yanked off a well-deserved leave and sent a couple of billion light years into space to rescue something that should not have been there in the first place. The other crew members are equally behind Miller, including the jokey Cooper, who claims to be both the
Lewis & Clark’s lifesaver and the heart breaker. Peters, a divorced mother of a crippled child who is also struggling with her guilt at having to leave her son behind during Christmas but is nonetheless a first rate medical officer, fondly referred to as “Momma Bear” by the crew.
The rescue technician Justin and the trauma medic DJ (referred to by Miller as ‘the gloomy gus in the corner over there’) make up the bulk of the crew which, as one, is a tightly knit and efficient one. Once the lost ship is discovered, the crew find that it is seemingly deserted but that things are not as they should be at all. On doing a bio-scan, Starck reports that she is “picking up trace life forms” words which do not bode well for the crew as there is no Scotty to beam them across, up or down to the ship, so the search begins, deck by deck, room by eerie room.
The crew experience a run of awful horrors, leading to fights breaking out amongst themselves and Dr Weir denying responsibility for anything with a lame-ass shrug of the shoulders and a pained “I don’t know.” Justin is sucked into the weird gateway of the ship’s gravity drive core and re-appears in a catatonic state: the resulting explosion damages the
Lewis & Clark and forces the crew to take shelter on the
Event Horizon while Smith and Cooper attempt to fix the damaged ship. The crew struggle to breathe aboard the
Horizon, not only because Trevor’s entire underpants stock have been piled in the air ducts but also because the CO2 levels are becoming toxic.
Miller is terrified by the voice of his colleague Edward Corrick whom he left to burn on his previous ship while Peters is haunted by visions of her crippled son (in one awful vision, he is sitting on an examining table with maggots crawling on his scarred, bleeding legs) and is the first crew member to start cracking, while Smith violently attacks Weir on the bridge, only to be stopped dead in his tracks by DJ holding a medical scalpel to his throat. Justin attempts suicide by throwing himself into an airlock, screaming as his veins start to expand and blood bursts from his eyes, only to be rescued by Miller who has sworn never to lose another crew member.
All the while, the crew is desperately attempting to find out what happened to their colleagues seven years prior to the
Horizon’s unexpected return. When they discover that the crew killed each other in a horrific blood orgy, the ship's creator is apparently oblivious to everything other than the hold his creation has on him as well as the fact that the aggrieved crew wants very much to tear him a new one at any available opportunity.
When the horror of what happened to the
Horizon’s crew sinks in and makes some members of the audience nearly puke, Miller orders the survivors back to the
Lewis & Clark, Weir disappears and Peters is killed in a fall which lands her broken body in the gravity drive room. Weir discovers her corpse and is confronted by the specter of his wife Claire, who pays her disloyal, wandering husband back for her suicide and abandonment by ripping both his eyes out. Now totally blind and mad (but somehow still able to see), Weir destroys the
Lewis & Clark with a hidden bomb, taking Smith and Cooper along with it and gets himself sucked out of the ship when Miller and Starck attack him.
By purging his suit, Cooper, clinging to the
Lewis & Clark’s debris, manages to make it back to the
Horizon and the three survivors plan to escape. The corridors become awash in blood, the central tank explodes (reminiscent of the elevators disgorging a torrent of blood in
The Shining) and Miller is trapped in the gravity room by the spectre of Corrick who is literally the Burning Man. Corrick reveals himself to be Weir, now re-incorporated and with his eyes back in place and after a brutal scuffle, Miller detonates the bombs in the main corridor, sending himself and Weir straight to hell through the black hole.
Almost three months later, the survivors of the debacle are found in the grav-couches by a rescue team, one of whom tells Starck that “They’re fine, they’re with us. You’re with us!” and flips his visor up to reveal Weir………………….
Liberate tutemei……..ex inferis…..This was the first film that I saw advertised on the internet ~ this was also the first time that I ever used the net. It was rated 18 in South Africa and for some odd reason, I chose to walk to the cinema, rather than take my car. That was a choice that I later regretted as the film started at 22h00 and I only got home after midnight, walking five miles with the horrific images from this film pounding in my head. The bed never felt so good, but I slept with the light on that night. With my Teddy bear, I should add.
Event Horizon ~ even in it’s present truncated form as allegedly, 20 minutes were cut out of it for an R rating ~ is a viscerally exciting, gory and at times funny production which tips its’ hat to films like
Alien and
The Shining. The big screen is ideally the place to see this and it is sad that twenty minutes were excised from the final edit so as not to receive the dreaded NC-17 rating. What is even sadder to me, as a film archivist, is that this footage was not preserved in order to hopefully one day, make a director’s cut and re-issue it.
The one thing ~ aside from the gory subject matter of Paul W S Anderson’s film ~ that disturbs me is how everyone’s eyes in the film seem to look, as though they were mirrors. In fact, this whole film seems to be about eyes and seeing, also the more horrific thing about losing your eyes and still being able to see, not unlike Ray Milland in
The Man With The X Ray Eyes. The script by Phillip Eisner is great, as is the eerie, otherworldly music by the late Michael Kamen and the atmospheric photography by the late Adrian Biddle. The production and art design is equally creepy and the visual effects are stunning indeed, with not much discernible CG work anywhere, even on the models.
Event Horizon is a truly great film, way ahead of its’ time and one that is winning a late but well-deserved revival and recognition on DVD……the film archivist that I am would however like to kick the film’s producers up the bum for destroying the edited footage instead of preserving it.