The stunning production design in ‘EVENT HORIZON (1997)’ doesn’t make up for… well, everything else.
#31DaysOfHorror: October 2nd, 2016
This October, as I have for the last three years, I’ll be watching 31 horror movies in 31 days and reviewing them all! You can see the ongoing list of what I’ve watched and reviewed here.
THE PLOT
In 2046, the crew of the Lewis & Clark discover a navigation beacon from the Event Horizon, a deep-space craft thought lost years ago. When they reunite, the Lewis & Clark discovers that the Event Horizon’s crew didn’t survive the journey to the furthest reaches of space… but the ship may not be empty…
MY REVIEW
There’s a lot to like about the first act of Event Horizon, before the plot devolves into a series of gross-out gore shots that fail to inspire much more than a moment’s revulsion. There’s great tension-building at first, anchored by acting from a stellar cast (led by Sam Neill, Laurence Fishburne, and Joely Richardson). There’s an intriguing story: a space ship that has traveled farther and seen more than humanity ever has before, returned from who-knows-where carrying evidence of unimaginable horrors.
And, my favorite aspect of the film: the movie boasts brilliant production design for its spaceships. Whatever else is going on, this movie is fun to look at. Sure, the grungy, lived-in feel of the Event Horizon owes great debt to Alien, but give or take a generic escape pod and a sterile white medical bay, I don’t remember all that much about specific locations aboard the Nostromo. And that’s fine for that film! There was nothing particularly special about the Nostromo until they locked on to a distress signal from a passing planet and picked up a particularly predatory passenger. It’s what was lurking behind the air vents and below the grated walkways that mattered. The Nostromo was just like any other ship.
But the Event Horizon is a special ship, and the design is creative enough that it stands out in the vast pantheon of space ships that owe design debt to Alien. The Event Horizon has been equipped with a first-of-its-kind “gravity drive,” which has the unique ability to “fold” space-time in order to bring two points together, so that the ship can simply move through the gateway and travel vast distances instantly. (Side note: props to the movie for the early scene where Sam Neill’s character is asked to explain how the gravity drive works, begs off because it’s too technical for laymen to understand, is yelled at for underestimating the intelligence of his fellow crew, gives a scientific mumbo-jumbo explanation, and is then roundly mocked for “not speaking English,” until he’s left spluttering and stuttering his way through his demonstration, all in the space of about thirty seconds. Great demonstration of the absurdity of obligatory “our science fiction stuff is too technical to understand, so please, audience, just go with it” scenes.)
The scene where Justin discovers the gravity drive while exploring the Event Horizon is my favorite scene in the film. It’s filled with a genuine sense of wonder, thanks in no small part to the production design. The hallway leading to the gravity drive and the room where the drive is kept do not suffer from being generic or forgettable. Instead, they are designed in a way that approaches pure cinema.
Cinéma pur was an avant-garde art-cinema movement in the ’20s and ’30s that wanted to return film to its essential elements of motion and light. After all, the word “cinema” comes from the Greek “kinema,” meaning “movement.” All film is, essentially, projected light that gives the illusion of real movement, and so filmmakers like Man Ray, René Clair, and Marcel Duchamp created abstract art films that showed patterns in motion, creating visually pleasing or intriguing compositions that reflected cinema’s power to dazzle the eye with moving light.
Event Horizon’s set design takes a similar approach the closer the characters get to the gravity drive (and to what turns out to be a gateway to Hell, but that’s neither here nor there). The walkway leading to the room where the drive is housed is a rotating funhouse hallway full of metal, light, and shadow, a “meat grinder” of a spiral that exists purely because of how cool it looks on screen. (The ship’s designer is asked to explain the hallway, and he says it had to be built that way to avoid compromising the magnetic fields… which, ok). Reduced to its pure cinema elements of movement and light, it’s reminiscent of Duchamp’s Anémic Cinéma, a film composed of nothing but optical-illusion spirals.
The gravity drive itself is also a swirling mass of borderline-abstract geometric patterns that seem to be simply constructed that way to be pleasing to the eye.
Given Event Horizon’s preoccupation with eyes, sight, and light — count the number of people whose eyes get gouged out, not to mention that an “event horizon” is the point past which light cannot escape a black hole — I don’t think I’m reaching to say that the people who made the film were thinking about these sorts of things when designing the movie. Some shots later in the film even emphasize that the gravity drive’s design is something that’s meant to be seen, and that it’s received by the viewer as a rotating, abstracted pattern of lights.
Unfortunately, that’s about where my interest in Event Horizon ends. After about the point where the gravity drive is glimpsed for the first time, the film devolves into a series of gross-out shock moments, meant to represent the “chaos” on the other side of the gateway. Apparently, when they traveled through the fold in space-time created by the gravity drive, the crew of the Event Horizon discovered a dimension of pure chaos… some of which has traveled back with them and is running amok on the ship, causing everyone to hallucinate graphic glimpses of disfigured, dismembered insanity.
Basically, it’s an excuse to stuff the rest of the film with gore. Whereas the first act of the film builds dread nicely, allowing you to imagine all sorts of horrible things that the crew might have encountered near Proxima Centauri, that all goes away once bloodied visions of barbed-wire-wrapped disemboweled torsos dance through everyone’s minds. There’s a finite number of times you can see the same quick glimpse of this guy before he stops being creepy.
Around the point where an unexplained river of blood gushes out of an elevator shaft, I realized what my growing disappointment was with Event Horizon. Namely, I’ve seen pretty much all of these elements done better, in far more coherent, consistent films. The river of blood, for example, is a clear homage to The Shining.
Watch the two clips:
It’s too much. The homage misunderstands what made that sequence in The Shining so indelibly creepy. It’s not the blood on its own; it’s the fact that this vision is a manifestation of the pure evil that stalks the corridors of the hotel. Both sequences have cutaway shots of the characters watching the rivers of blood in horror, but in The Shining, we understand that Danny is having a vision, and we feel a deep sense of dread as a result; the river of blood is a portent of the horror to come. The wave of blood reaches the camera and we are subsumed into the wave of terror.
In Event Horizon, though, the river of blood is the horror. There’s no subtlety (not that rivers of blood are ever “subtle,” exactly). Joely Richardson’s character is in physical danger in this moment, and she flails around in the blood and it’s gross, sure, but it’s not scary in the same way the scene in The Shining is. When Event Horizon’s river of blood reaches the camera, it’s because we’re in Joely Richardson’s point of view and she is going under. We’re not.
The whole rest of the film feels like that: cobbled together from other, better films. There are echoes of Alien, as I’ve mentioned. I think the whole plot point of “people on a ship going insane due to a malevolent sphere that gives them visions of their deepest fears” is done better in Sphere. The end of Event Horizon becomes almost a slasher film, without the decency to be campy fun, which is something that Sunshine understands was necessary. And, hell, if we’re talking about campy-fun gory slashers set on spaceships, Event Horizon had me thinking the whole last 45 minutes that I should have just watched Jason X instead.
I know Event Horizon pre-dated some of those films. But I don’t know that I’d say I think Event Horizon influenced them. Instead, I think they took up the same tropes that Event Horizon did and used them to better, more entertaining ends. It’s a shame Event Horizon couldn’t sustain the sense of wonder and creeping dread it created so well in the beginning.
Ah, well. I’ll always have the gifs of pretty spinning lights.
