Last night I went to see "Event Horizon", which had been billed as a science fiction movie. What got delivered was an overproduced schlock horror flick which happened to be set in outer space. As Mark Todd remarked to me on leaving the theater, "Detergent leaves a better film."
The premise of "Event Horizon" is that a spaceship, which just happens to be named "Event Horizon", is built to use an artificially created singularity to make faster-than-light travel possible. The flight plan is to make a trip to Proxima Centauri, but instead the crew is treated to a tour of downtown Hell. Neither the society nor the climate appeared to agree with them. Seven years after its disappearance, the ship suddenly reappears in the upper atmosphere of Neptune. A search-and-rescue party is dispatched, which includes the designer of the Event Horizon's warped drive.
From first contact on, the film plays every low and grubby trick to provoke a rise from the audience. As time goes on, the tricks become lower, grubbier, and more blatant, until nothing less than baths of blood or flayings will suffice to move the theme along. I say "theme" advisedly, since no new ground is covered by what might, very loosely, be termed a "plot".
Sam Neill plays the part of Dr. Weir, the Event Horizon's designer. Playing thesaurus, we can find that "weir" is a sort of "dam", and "dam" is a homonym for "damn". Sure enough, Dr. Weir becomes one damn thing after another toward the end of the flick. There seemed to have been some abortive effort on the part of a scriptwriter for something like "character development", but it never really congealed into anything coherent. Weir's *internal* personal demons are his memory of his suicided wife Claire. As the film progresses, Weir alternates between the role of demented creator a la Frankenstein and simple victim, hearing Claire calling his name and having the lights flicker on and off. Finally, Weir undergoes various physical transformations reminiscent of "Hellraiser" and goes wholly into possessed pain-in-the-butt mode.
The science in this scifi film was notable by its absence. For one thing, the spacecraft in 2047 seem to take artificial gravity for granted, yet the production of an artificial singularity is considered a top secret. There's the usual use of sound effects for the impossible propagation of noise across vacuum. The use of outer space as a venue is entirely gratuitous, as the dialog, such as it is, would work just as well given any place that was both inaccessible and prone to sudden losses of communication, perhaps like the Bates Motel, if Norman Bates happened to tinker with high-energy physics in the basement and had a handy cistern of blood for drop-in guests.
To be continued.