EVENT HORIZON @ 25

Hyper technological ship the Event Horizon disappeared on its first mission but has mysteriously reappeared in the exact coordinates it vanished from. It's silent. Are the crew still there? It would make some seriously boastable salvage. A veteran crew set off in retrieval with the physics wizz designer in tow because you never know when you'll need to explain something baffling. Two months later they're on the doorstep to Neptune and there's the big beasty in orbit. They hook up and board it and then everything goes to hell. Well, it's kind of already been there so this is more like a traveller's slide show of hell. Then, let's see who gets out.

That is the plot and the problem of Event Horizon. An impressive premise turns into an action movie in a gothic setting. Yeah, so what's my problem? My problem is that, while it's nice to watch and the suspense works every time, the really interesting bits are abandoned half way through the second act and it settles into a by the numbers actioner. The notion of what happens when a ship with a gravity drive goes interdimensional and comes back alive is flattened of its science fiction and gives way to a horror tale that needs its good art direction to stop it feeling routine.

It's not the cast's fault. Sam Neill does a great line in understated villain. Laurence Fishburne, only a few years before iconic status as Morpheus, gives great gravitas with a troubled moral centre. Everyone else does their job well. It's not the look or sound. A spaceship as a gothic cathedral works a treat and scene after scene impresses with scale and invention. It's none of the parts of a feature film that might let it down but the weight of expensive suits on the creatives to beat or at least match the threat of an unfathomable monster.

Event Horizon was intended to be released before the looming Titanic took all the money from everyone in the world. Not only was it rushed it was tampered with at every stage post production until everything that explained everything but the most basic of plots was surgically amputated by the money people. You can still see some of the surrealistic gore in flashes but these images were part of longer scenes that would drive the dread into solid horror. Scenes and or dialogue that gave purpose to the rookie testing the black hole were excised for being wordy or adding running time, turning the scene into something as stupid as the alien petting scene in Prometheus. What might well have become a forbidding classic of the form ended as an occasionally scary, jobbing sci-fi  actioner.

The film has had an igloo of cultism built around it because of what was cut; images from long destroyed footage that no one outside of a very few insiders. See also David Lynch's Dune for this. If cults based on the invisible remind you too uncomfortably of the world's religions consider only that the forbidden can lure like nothing in the realm of evidence. 

Back on Lynch, as part of a promo for his own remaster of Eraserhead, he hooked a number from the boxset package to his then commercial website that unlocked a cut scene from the film, in good quality. The scene did nothing for the overall scheme of the film but was good to see and fit the dcirector's aesthetic perfectly. But that was it. Once the link (and then then the site) was gone it was there no more. Then again, the remaining cut of Eraserhead is the official one and it's steadfastly beyond genre, considered timelessly weird without the need of more. 

Event Horizon's routine execution feels deprived of what promised to be the real substance, the forbidden and the severe. We glimpse in fractions of seconds images that might have made us look through our fingers. We miss what we never had and can never have. What we do have is a more than passable film which borrows its best from Alien and its least fulfilled from Solaris (and a lot from Hellraiser) that we can put on at any time under chit chat and a glass of wine. That's better than I can say of anything by Wes Anderson.