A haunted spaceship movie that really isn’t very good despite a rabid cult following. It has some good ideas that get sidetracked by cgi spectacle that has not aged well.
The film is about the ship Event Horizon which has can travel faster than light through the use of a dangerous new drive. The ship disappeared after its first flight and reappeared seven years later. A rescue crew is dispatched to figure out what happened to the ship.
There are some great sci fi concepts. The ship travels faster than light by punching a hole through space. When the ship made this hole it traveled to a dimension of pure chaos. It’s essentially hell. The idea that human science and technology could violate the natural laws and lead people into this world of dark horror is thrilling. It combines hard sci fi with religious ideas in a seamless way.
It’s too bad the film spends so much of its time on mindless spectacle. So much of the films run time is spent on explosions and cgi blood. There are multiple massive explosions two big cgi set pieces involving people getting sucked into space, and a climactic fist fight in a flaming room. The ideas are totally swallowed up by these empty attempts to thrill. Speaking of thrills, there are so many poorly executed jump scares in this movie. They are so obvious and telegraphed that it’s hard to believe anyone could be scared by it.
The characters are sadly wasted here. They have some great backstories and pain they need to work through, but most of these backstories are relegated to single lines of dialogue spoken hurriedly between exposition and explosions. That said Sam Neil and Lawrence Fishbourne manage time break through and register on screen as actual characters with some sense of inner depth and personal history.
There are some truly disturbing and frightening images in this film. When this dark hell dimension is shown in brief glimpses it hints at a movie with a greater sense of horror. It hints that this movie had a true vision that got tamped out by some external force. But we can’t judge the movie that could have been. As it stands this one isn’t very good.
Not really my cup of tea. C
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