Rating: 8.5/10
Review date: May 23, 2002
As suggested by the title, this movie is about a spaceship with the name �Event Horizon�. The year was 2040 and the Event Horizon mysteriously disappears near the orbit of Neptune without any trace until it suddenly reappears again seven years later.
A team of rescue crew was sent in to investigate and what they found is a deserted spaceship which will soon be their greatest nightmare ever�
Everything about this movie just blows me away from the beginning to the end. The movie starts with a cool opening music which is followed by a few minutes of characters� introduction.
It is not long before the pace of the movie begins to pick up considerably (the total running time is only about an hour and a half) and the audience will be taken on a roller coaster ride of terror right through the end.
One positive aspect about this horror flick is that it�s not anything like Alien or other monster movies. Even though the setting is also in a spaceship, what director Paul Anderson had accomplished here is to build the audiences� anxiety level on what�s going to come next before letting it all out in a very revealing climax. This is also made very effective by the use of several �boo� moments which caught me completely off guard.
The two notable appearances here are Laurence Fishburne as Captain Miller and Sam Neill as Dr. William Weir. Laurence Fishburne performs his task really as the captain of the rescue team whose main concern is to get his crew out of Event Horizon safely. Sam Neill�s role is very believable as the scientist who designed the spaceship and thus very keen on finding the truth.
The movie is very successful in the sense that it doesn�t try to present a being or creature to scare the audience such as Alien, Relic or Mimic. What Anderson did was to build up the psychological suspense slowly from the beginning and it is the ambiguity of the whole issue that keeps me glued to my seat all the time.
Perhaps the most memorable aspect for me about Event Horizon is the amount of violence that the movie has. There are some really disgusting and violent scenes which make this movie not recommended for the squeamish (one scene in particular where a man�s abdomen is being ripped open while he is still alive and the guts spilled all over a table).
One thing for sure is that Anderson is forced to cut 20 minutes of violence for the movie to get an R rating so you can imagine how gory the movie is. It seems as if Anderson�s trademark lies in the amount of gore in his movies as we can see from his other movies such as Resident Evil.
Memorable quote: �You can�t leave. She won�t let you��
-Sam Neill as Dr. William Weir-
(c) 2002 Martin Taidy