Beyond the black horizon
A review requested by Michael, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon.
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We have absolutely no evidence that this is actually how it went down (arguably, we have evidence to the contrary), but I have such a powerful vision of the origins of Event Horizon, I can almost reach out and touch it: teenage Paul W.S. Anderson, having heard Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris described as a "ghost story" and "haunted house movie", straps himself in for a spooky space adventure, only to be outraged by spending the next three hours with talky Soviet musings on guilt and grief, hushed silence, and long takes of cars driving on the highway. Skip forward many years, and Anderson, now the toast of Hollywood based on the unexpected success of his U.S. debut, 1995's Mortal Kombat (that part is actually true - he apparently had his choice of projects after that film, and the one he picked was this script by Philip Eisner) elects to finally correct Tarkovsky's worst mistake: he will, by God, make the vulgar, excessive horror movie version of Solaris that he'd been promised.
I mean, sure, Anderson himself name-dropped The Haunting and The Shining as direct influences on his 1997 film maudit, and of course any film that does the And Then There Were None narrative structure ...in space! is going to automatically demand comparison to Alien. But look, you give me a film about futuristic science overreaching itself and stepping across the boundary separating the material world from the spiritual plane, and that this interpenetration will result in the film's characters having visions of the deceased loved ones they feel most painfully responsible for, most prominently including a wife who committed suicide, none of those is the first place my mind goes. And I like that about Event Horizon. "The dumb, trashy Solaris" isn't something I would have known to ask for, but since it's been provided to me regardless, I think it's pretty easy to make the best of it: Anderson's whole career has been dedicated to making dumb trash with an exceptional amount of conviction and stylistic flair.
Besides, Event Horizon isn't merely a tacky variant of a legendary art film. It's also a tacky variant of a legendary sci-fi horror thriller, and as Alien knock-offs go, it's a pretty tight, propulsive one. I regret to say that at least some of this propulsion comes at the direct expense of the director's intentions. The film had an unusually well-documented post-production: briefly, the film had an unyielding U.S. release date in mid-August, 1997 (it was, of all things, mean to be Paramount's insurance against the likely outcome that James Cameron's Titanic, which was hopscotching between release dates throughout the second half of the year, would turn out to be a huge flop), and by the time photography was done, Anderson and editor Martin Hunter had a grand total of four weeks to prepare a first cut. That's an incomprehensibly short time to rough-cut an effects-driven feature film, and what they had at the end of it was a baggy 130-minute version, lingering on the extensive gore effects that had been responsible for extending the shoot and leading to that harried editing period; the filmmakers admit that it didn't play much at all. The studio freaked out at this and demanded a shorter cut with much less ultra-violent material, and in a panicked frenzy, Anderson and Hunter bashed out a release cut that runs 96 minutes with credits, and which the filmmakers also don't think plays especially well. Anderson has since expressed his wish to revisit the material for a proper director's cut, assembled in leisure and with appropriate thoughtfulness, but he's also made it clear that such a thing will never, ever exist, since much of the footage is missing, and only a single VHS tape is known to have the material of the rough cut.
I'm sorry that Anderson doesn't like his film very much, but I have to say, the 96-minute cut doesn't feel particularly lacking to me. The reduction in the film's violent imagery may have been done in haste and unwillingly, but it was also done judiciously: in the cut as it stands, there's a steady and appropriate escalation of violence that culminates in one specific gore effect (somebody whose eyes have been ripped out of his skull) that feels very much like a crescendo, at exactly the narrative and thematic point that such a crescendo was warranted. If the unused gore effects were as indulgent and excessive as seems likely (the phrase "blood orgy" gets used a lot in discussions of the lost material), I don't know that this moment would have "popped" so much. And while I enjoy a good marathon of baroque gore makeup as much as the next fella, there's something to be said for storytelling discipline.
Anyway, that's a lot of words without more than implying what the film's story even is, and with a name like Event Horizon, it's extremely likely you'd jump to the wrong conclusion. There are no black holes here (though there is an artificial wormhole, never identified by that particular word); the Event Horizon is instead the name of an experimental interstellar vessel that went missing on its first flight in 2040. Now it's 2047, and the ship has just been discovered in orbit around Neptune, so a mission is launched to see what the hell went wrong. In best '90s fashion, that mission is populated by a Cameron-esque collection of more-or-less "types" who are extremely hard to tell apart, given that they all have a kind of shared "over-educated blue-collar" skill set, and a unified attitude of sarcastic confidence. But we'll run through them anyway: Captain Miller (Laurence Fishburne) is far and away the most recognisable, both because he's the captain and thus a main character, and also because Fishburne is certainly the most familiar actor in the cast; Lieutenant Starck (Joely Richardson) is his executive officer; D.J. (Jason Isaacs) is the doctor and Peters (Kathleen Quinlan) is the "medical technician", which is somehow not the same as the doctor; Cooper (Richard T. Jones) is the "rescue technician" which is somehow not the same as either the doctor or the medial technician, and the film is so aware that he's a redundant character who's just there to pad the body count that he's introduced with a line of dialogue that's only a few degrees away from "don't worry about his job, we couldn't actually come up with one, because it really doesn't matter". Smith (Sean Pertwee, whose father Jon was not merely one of the title characters during the original run Doctor Who, he was the Doctor whose tenure witnessed the explosion of "base under siege" stories that Event Horizon draws from) is I think officially the pilot, but he plays as a generic "tech guy", and Ensign Justin (Jack Noseworthy) is around to be the fresh-faced kid whose innocence will be a contrast to the horrors around him. None of these people are the protagonist: that honor goes to Dr. William "Billy" Weir (Sam Neill), the designer of the wormhole technology that Event Horizon was testing; he's the odd man out, the newbie who hasn't been on these long-haul spaceflights before, the one who has visions of a woman (Holley Chant) from the moment he's put into cryo-sleep, and we can guess with very little effort that she was his wife and now she's tragically dead, and this will become a problem once Weir is on the Event Horizon itself, and whatever horrible thing happened causes him to have visions of her (and he's not the only one, though Peters is the only person whose visions take the form of a tragic backstory, probably because in 1997, Quinlan was the third-biggest name in this cast, after Fishburne and Neill).
There's really not much more to this than "investigators in a haunted house", though it's a very satisfactory version of that. For one thing, the house itself is a pretty fantastic piece of design: I'm sure that I'm just blatantly nostalgic for this mode of film production, but I think even by 1997 standards, this film has some excellent sets, courtesy of production designer Joseph Bennett. There are are not very many of them, but the film makes the ones it can afford to build count for a lot: the magical wormhole drive is a particularly wonderful practical effect, a giant spinning ball surrounded by a rotating ring, all of it covered with soft yellow lightbulbs, and the whole thing plopped into an amphitheatre-like room covered in gunmetal grey panels with some kind of odd Gothic design. But even the simpler spaces are still pretty great: I am especially fond of a room that's some kind of future-tech access corridor consisting of a catwalk inside a large spinning cylinder, and the cylinder has had circle shaped cut-outs made into its surface in a spiral pattern, and there are lights on all sides of the cylinder, so those circle create little swirling, kaleidoscopic patterns of light. It's no more high-tech than a carnival funhouse, but executed with great creativity and a phenomenal flair for atmosphere.
For another thing, the haunting is clever enough, in a heaving, dumb way. As I said, there is no "event horizon" in Event Horizon, but Eisner was still maybe thinking of black holes in general and of The Black Hole specifically, Disney's 1979 attempt to break into adult-friendly sci-fi. Because this film borrows the single weirdest concept from that film (mild spoiler for this film, but major spoiler for The Black Hole): the idea that these big spatial anomalies ripping holes in the universe aren't merely connecting us to other parts of our dimension, they're connecting us to other dimensions, and specifically to a dimension that is, for all intents and purposes, literal Hell, in the Christian sense. Because what happens once the crew arrives on the ship is that Weir gets seduced by the visions of his wife, which soften him up and prey upon his depression, and he is thereupon possessed. Like, "possessed" possessed, by a for-real demon. Hell-dimensions in outer space weren't new in 1997 - I just gave an example of one that was 18 years older, and The Black Hole didn't invent it either - but Event Horizon does an unusually good job of running with it, for a couple of reasons. One is that the gore make-up really does feel like something vile and torturous, something that comes from a place of such merciless cruelty that it really cannot be called human; another in the seemingly limitless number of movies this is stealing from, it feels very much like "Hellraiser in space" (and is much, much better at it than the actual Hellraiser in Space), and while the relatively demure theatrical cut does diminish that somewhat, there's still a lot of truly grueling material glimpsed here in little nightmarish flickers.Another is that Sam Neill is going all-out on his performance: in a cast that is so much better than it needs to be (Fisburne, Quinlan, and Isaacs are all legitimately excellent actors, and Richardson and Pertwee are no slouches, and none of them are treating the material with anything other than total sincerity - even though Isaacs and Pertwee, in particular, have absolutely no reason not to just sleepwalk through their non-roles), Neill is still the obvious standout, letting his character's traumatic past color everything he does while still making it clear that the character is first and foremost a scientist, with the curiosity of an actual real-world experimenter and the haughty megalomania of the "we must leave the monster alive! for SCIENCE!" villain from a '50s B-movie. And after Weir gets possessed, he pivots into that with a degree of predatory malice that's genuinely unsettling and makes it clear that the doctor's old personality has now been shredded apart and only exists as fragments. It's a perfect "big" performance for a movie that's concerned primarily with providing the best possible junky thrills in a resolutely B-movie mode, legitimately one of the best screen performances Neill has given, I think (even just amongst his '90s popcorn movies, he's just as good here as in Jurassic Park, and a damn sight better than in the generically similar In the Mouth of Madness). He's treating hammy clichés with a sincerity and gravity that makes them feel meaningful, without in the process burying the tawdry fun to be had with the hamminess, and in this he is the perfect embodiment of the whole Event Horizon project, which similarly approaches some very silly third-tier post-Lovecraft nonsense with a enthusiastic desire to make it the most enjoyably trashy version of itself possible.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
Do you have a movie you'd like to see reviewed? This and other perks can be found on our Patreon page!
We have absolutely no evidence that this is actually how it went down (arguably, we have evidence to the contrary), but I have such a powerful vision of the origins of Event Horizon, I can almost reach out and touch it: teenage Paul W.S. Anderson, having heard Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris described as a "ghost story" and "haunted house movie", straps himself in for a spooky space adventure, only to be outraged by spending the next three hours with talky Soviet musings on guilt and grief, hushed silence, and long takes of cars driving on the highway. Skip forward many years, and Anderson, now the toast of Hollywood based on the unexpected success of his U.S. debut, 1995's Mortal Kombat (that part is actually true - he apparently had his choice of projects after that film, and the one he picked was this script by Philip Eisner) elects to finally correct Tarkovsky's worst mistake: he will, by God, make the vulgar, excessive horror movie version of Solaris that he'd been promised.
I mean, sure, Anderson himself name-dropped The Haunting and The Shining as direct influences on his 1997 film maudit, and of course any film that does the And Then There Were None narrative structure ...in space! is going to automatically demand comparison to Alien. But look, you give me a film about futuristic science overreaching itself and stepping across the boundary separating the material world from the spiritual plane, and that this interpenetration will result in the film's characters having visions of the deceased loved ones they feel most painfully responsible for, most prominently including a wife who committed suicide, none of those is the first place my mind goes. And I like that about Event Horizon. "The dumb, trashy Solaris" isn't something I would have known to ask for, but since it's been provided to me regardless, I think it's pretty easy to make the best of it: Anderson's whole career has been dedicated to making dumb trash with an exceptional amount of conviction and stylistic flair.
Besides, Event Horizon isn't merely a tacky variant of a legendary art film. It's also a tacky variant of a legendary sci-fi horror thriller, and as Alien knock-offs go, it's a pretty tight, propulsive one. I regret to say that at least some of this propulsion comes at the direct expense of the director's intentions. The film had an unusually well-documented post-production: briefly, the film had an unyielding U.S. release date in mid-August, 1997 (it was, of all things, mean to be Paramount's insurance against the likely outcome that James Cameron's Titanic, which was hopscotching between release dates throughout the second half of the year, would turn out to be a huge flop), and by the time photography was done, Anderson and editor Martin Hunter had a grand total of four weeks to prepare a first cut. That's an incomprehensibly short time to rough-cut an effects-driven feature film, and what they had at the end of it was a baggy 130-minute version, lingering on the extensive gore effects that had been responsible for extending the shoot and leading to that harried editing period; the filmmakers admit that it didn't play much at all. The studio freaked out at this and demanded a shorter cut with much less ultra-violent material, and in a panicked frenzy, Anderson and Hunter bashed out a release cut that runs 96 minutes with credits, and which the filmmakers also don't think plays especially well. Anderson has since expressed his wish to revisit the material for a proper director's cut, assembled in leisure and with appropriate thoughtfulness, but he's also made it clear that such a thing will never, ever exist, since much of the footage is missing, and only a single VHS tape is known to have the material of the rough cut.
I'm sorry that Anderson doesn't like his film very much, but I have to say, the 96-minute cut doesn't feel particularly lacking to me. The reduction in the film's violent imagery may have been done in haste and unwillingly, but it was also done judiciously: in the cut as it stands, there's a steady and appropriate escalation of violence that culminates in one specific gore effect (somebody whose eyes have been ripped out of his skull) that feels very much like a crescendo, at exactly the narrative and thematic point that such a crescendo was warranted. If the unused gore effects were as indulgent and excessive as seems likely (the phrase "blood orgy" gets used a lot in discussions of the lost material), I don't know that this moment would have "popped" so much. And while I enjoy a good marathon of baroque gore makeup as much as the next fella, there's something to be said for storytelling discipline.
Anyway, that's a lot of words without more than implying what the film's story even is, and with a name like Event Horizon, it's extremely likely you'd jump to the wrong conclusion. There are no black holes here (though there is an artificial wormhole, never identified by that particular word); the Event Horizon is instead the name of an experimental interstellar vessel that went missing on its first flight in 2040. Now it's 2047, and the ship has just been discovered in orbit around Neptune, so a mission is launched to see what the hell went wrong. In best '90s fashion, that mission is populated by a Cameron-esque collection of more-or-less "types" who are extremely hard to tell apart, given that they all have a kind of shared "over-educated blue-collar" skill set, and a unified attitude of sarcastic confidence. But we'll run through them anyway: Captain Miller (Laurence Fishburne) is far and away the most recognisable, both because he's the captain and thus a main character, and also because Fishburne is certainly the most familiar actor in the cast; Lieutenant Starck (Joely Richardson) is his executive officer; D.J. (Jason Isaacs) is the doctor and Peters (Kathleen Quinlan) is the "medical technician", which is somehow not the same as the doctor; Cooper (Richard T. Jones) is the "rescue technician" which is somehow not the same as either the doctor or the medial technician, and the film is so aware that he's a redundant character who's just there to pad the body count that he's introduced with a line of dialogue that's only a few degrees away from "don't worry about his job, we couldn't actually come up with one, because it really doesn't matter". Smith (Sean Pertwee, whose father Jon was not merely one of the title characters during the original run Doctor Who, he was the Doctor whose tenure witnessed the explosion of "base under siege" stories that Event Horizon draws from) is I think officially the pilot, but he plays as a generic "tech guy", and Ensign Justin (Jack Noseworthy) is around to be the fresh-faced kid whose innocence will be a contrast to the horrors around him. None of these people are the protagonist: that honor goes to Dr. William "Billy" Weir (Sam Neill), the designer of the wormhole technology that Event Horizon was testing; he's the odd man out, the newbie who hasn't been on these long-haul spaceflights before, the one who has visions of a woman (Holley Chant) from the moment he's put into cryo-sleep, and we can guess with very little effort that she was his wife and now she's tragically dead, and this will become a problem once Weir is on the Event Horizon itself, and whatever horrible thing happened causes him to have visions of her (and he's not the only one, though Peters is the only person whose visions take the form of a tragic backstory, probably because in 1997, Quinlan was the third-biggest name in this cast, after Fishburne and Neill).
There's really not much more to this than "investigators in a haunted house", though it's a very satisfactory version of that. For one thing, the house itself is a pretty fantastic piece of design: I'm sure that I'm just blatantly nostalgic for this mode of film production, but I think even by 1997 standards, this film has some excellent sets, courtesy of production designer Joseph Bennett. There are are not very many of them, but the film makes the ones it can afford to build count for a lot: the magical wormhole drive is a particularly wonderful practical effect, a giant spinning ball surrounded by a rotating ring, all of it covered with soft yellow lightbulbs, and the whole thing plopped into an amphitheatre-like room covered in gunmetal grey panels with some kind of odd Gothic design. But even the simpler spaces are still pretty great: I am especially fond of a room that's some kind of future-tech access corridor consisting of a catwalk inside a large spinning cylinder, and the cylinder has had circle shaped cut-outs made into its surface in a spiral pattern, and there are lights on all sides of the cylinder, so those circle create little swirling, kaleidoscopic patterns of light. It's no more high-tech than a carnival funhouse, but executed with great creativity and a phenomenal flair for atmosphere.
For another thing, the haunting is clever enough, in a heaving, dumb way. As I said, there is no "event horizon" in Event Horizon, but Eisner was still maybe thinking of black holes in general and of The Black Hole specifically, Disney's 1979 attempt to break into adult-friendly sci-fi. Because this film borrows the single weirdest concept from that film (mild spoiler for this film, but major spoiler for The Black Hole): the idea that these big spatial anomalies ripping holes in the universe aren't merely connecting us to other parts of our dimension, they're connecting us to other dimensions, and specifically to a dimension that is, for all intents and purposes, literal Hell, in the Christian sense. Because what happens once the crew arrives on the ship is that Weir gets seduced by the visions of his wife, which soften him up and prey upon his depression, and he is thereupon possessed. Like, "possessed" possessed, by a for-real demon. Hell-dimensions in outer space weren't new in 1997 - I just gave an example of one that was 18 years older, and The Black Hole didn't invent it either - but Event Horizon does an unusually good job of running with it, for a couple of reasons. One is that the gore make-up really does feel like something vile and torturous, something that comes from a place of such merciless cruelty that it really cannot be called human; another in the seemingly limitless number of movies this is stealing from, it feels very much like "Hellraiser in space" (and is much, much better at it than the actual Hellraiser in Space), and while the relatively demure theatrical cut does diminish that somewhat, there's still a lot of truly grueling material glimpsed here in little nightmarish flickers.Another is that Sam Neill is going all-out on his performance: in a cast that is so much better than it needs to be (Fisburne, Quinlan, and Isaacs are all legitimately excellent actors, and Richardson and Pertwee are no slouches, and none of them are treating the material with anything other than total sincerity - even though Isaacs and Pertwee, in particular, have absolutely no reason not to just sleepwalk through their non-roles), Neill is still the obvious standout, letting his character's traumatic past color everything he does while still making it clear that the character is first and foremost a scientist, with the curiosity of an actual real-world experimenter and the haughty megalomania of the "we must leave the monster alive! for SCIENCE!" villain from a '50s B-movie. And after Weir gets possessed, he pivots into that with a degree of predatory malice that's genuinely unsettling and makes it clear that the doctor's old personality has now been shredded apart and only exists as fragments. It's a perfect "big" performance for a movie that's concerned primarily with providing the best possible junky thrills in a resolutely B-movie mode, legitimately one of the best screen performances Neill has given, I think (even just amongst his '90s popcorn movies, he's just as good here as in Jurassic Park, and a damn sight better than in the generically similar In the Mouth of Madness). He's treating hammy clichés with a sincerity and gravity that makes them feel meaningful, without in the process burying the tawdry fun to be had with the hamminess, and in this he is the perfect embodiment of the whole Event Horizon project, which similarly approaches some very silly third-tier post-Lovecraft nonsense with a enthusiastic desire to make it the most enjoyably trashy version of itself possible.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
