Event Horizon ***½ (1997, Laurence Fishburne, Joely Richardson, Sam Neill, Kathleen Quinlan) – Classic Movie Review 1173

Script problems and an unnecessarily nasty tone do some structural damage to director Paul (Mortal Kombat) Anderson’s eerily spooky 1997 science-fiction chiller, in which a rescue ship sets off to find the title deep-space research vessel that’s somehow vanished into a black hole beyond Neptune.

It disappeared on its maiden voyage seven years earlier but has now mysteriously returned. A grim-faced Laurence Fishburne (as Captain Miller) and his rescue crew board the vessel, only to find themselves trapped on a ghost ship at the gateway to hell with someone or something new and scary on board.

There’s a better film to be made here but, for all Event Horizon’s faults, Anderson still delivers a dark, disturbing horror movie convincingly set on a spaceship in the future (it’s 2047) that’s commendably pretty creepy and scary.

A gleamingly smart British-based production is a great credit to the craftsmen in the UK film studios, creating eye-boggling high-tech effects and fabulous gothic space sets that take your breath away. But, though Paul Anderson thumps it all along with plenty of shocks and scares, the promising if cynically derivative plotline turns out to be nothing more than the old Star Trek-style haunted house hokum that’s all great build-up and no climax.

Looking fed-up, Fishburne seems all at sea in outer space, and a miscast Joely Richardson (as Lieutenant Starck) could have saved herself the price of the trip, but Sam Neill enjoys himself hugely as the ship’s mad scientist creator, Dr William Weir. If only there’d been some monsters and less gore, then we would have had a real event on the horizon.

It was a surprise box office flop, recouping only $47million of its $60million budget. Anderson was offered the job after directing the hit Mortal Kombat in 1995 and turned down directing X-Men to do it. The release date was already agreed, giving him production and final cut headaches. But Paramount didn’t officially greenlight the film until 10 weeks before production was to begin, somany leading production designers turned the film down and the production design had to be rushed.  But, in the end, production designer Joseph Bennett‘s sets look awesome.

Anderson’s original graphic and much gorier version of 130 minutes was cut back to 95 minutes after test audiences and the studio executives rejected it. The effects weren’t finished at this point when the test audiences and studio executives saw it. And Neil Corbould‘s visual effects proved a sight for sore eyes too.

Anderson now regrets cutting his film by 30 minutes and reducing the violence, as ordered by the studio. This first version was found on poor-quality VHS and is now available for viewing but the unused film footage is otherwise missing presumed lost.

It was filmed at the Albert R. Broccoli 007 Stage, Pinewood Studios, Iver Heath, Buckinghamshire, England.

Kathleen Quinlan, Richard T Jones, Jack Noseworthy, Jason Isaacs and Sean Pertwee also star.

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© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Film Review 1173

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