The Trailer
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The Appropriate Tune: "Can't Take My Eyes Off You", by Frankie Valli and The 4 Seasons
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The Appropriate Tune: "Can't Take My Eyes Off You", by Frankie Valli and The 4 Seasons
While tales of evil invaders from beyond the stars have existed for over a century at this point, going all the way back to H.G. Wells’ seminal work ‘The War of the Worlds’, it was only after humanity managed to break out into the last frontier that the concept of ‘space horror’ really came into being. Writers like H.P. Lovecraft may have scratched the surface of the issue, but it wasn’t until outer space became a matter of public knowledge that the reality of it all began to sink in. That space is a vast, unknowable thing that stretches out farther than the eye can see, filled with things that we only can only theorize and speculate about. That the only way to even begin to experience it is to shelter yourself within a tiny little suit and a tiny little ship, and hope that you thought out every contingency so that your and your crewmates don’t suffer a painful, horrible death. It’s a humbling reminder of just how frail humanity really is and just how small our reach is when compared to the grand scale of the universe.
It does make for some pretty good movies though.
In 2040, decades after Earth has established itself on the Moon and Mars, a ship known as the Event Horizon disappeared somewhere around Neptune. The Event Horizon was a research vessel, outfitted with an experimental engine known as the Gravity Drive, which was meant to enable faster-than-light travel and propel us beyond the solar system. Specifically, the Gravity Drive used a magnetically contained singularity to open up ‘dimensional gates’, allowing you to pass through two points in space simultaneously. Had it not disappeared, it would have been the most important scientific discovery since the splitting of the atom.
Seven years later, Dr. Weir (the designer of the Event Horizon and the Gravity Drive) and the crew of the Lewis & Clark rediscover the E.H. on Neptune after receiving an bizarre distress signal from the ship, despite the fact that the ship is way too damaged for the crew to have survived. Sure enough, the former crew are dead, with strange abrasions around their eyes, as if they were clawed out. Even stranger, the Gravity Drive seems to be active, which it shouldn’t be according to Dr. Weir. Then the hallucinations start, and the crew of the Lewis & Clark realize that their lives are about to become a living hell. Literally.
There’s one thing I’ll say in Event Horizon’s favor: aside from some dated CGI, this film is fucking gorgeous.The scene with Weir inside the duct with rows and rows of glowing circuit boards lining the walls, the spinning blades of the walkway leading up the Gravity Drive, even the cockpit of the Lewis & Clark just look so meticulously crafted that you just want to be in those rooms, to just stand there and watch all the lights blink and pieces turn. Sure, the influences are obvious, Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Scott’s Alien, but plenty of other movies have tried walking down the same road as Event Horizon and haven’t looked even half as good. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery when it’s done well, and in terms of artistic design Event Horizon has done very well.
As nice as the films looks, the truth is that Event Horizon just...isn’t scary. At all, really. Sure, they try to do scary stuff, like ‘ooh, this person hallucinated some gross thing’ or ‘wowee, that lady has no eyeballs’, but it never takes that extra step forward that pushes it into truly disturbing territory as proper lovecraftian-style horror. I’ve heard that executive meddling cut down a good portion of the more graphic scenes in the film, and while I’m sure they tried to make the best with what they were dealt, it just comes across as flaccid. I mean Hellraiser wasn’t exactly movie gold either, but it managed to be far more bizarre and far more disturbing for what was probably a far smaller budget, and I respect that film for it. It’s both science fiction and horror man, the only limit should be your imagination! Maybe you should have taken a lesson from John Carpenter’s The Thing while you were busy making the giving the spiky black hole engine room a moat for whatever reason.
Also, I don’t know if this is worth mentioning, since this is Paul W.S. Anderson and all, director of as many shitty Resident Evil movies as there are shitty Resident Evil games, but Event Horizon kind of gets really, really dumb by the end. I don’t know if this was the end result of more studio meddling or what, but it seems like that by the last third of the movie Anderson decided that he was done making a spooky horror movie and shifted into making an action movie instead, and a painfully corny one at that. Suddenly the wise-crackin’ comedy relief character is showing up to save the day, despite being launched into Neptune’s orbit earlier in the film, and Laurence Fishburne is fighting a psychic manifestation of evil, and it just feels way to energetic and hopeful for what should be a hopeless psychological horror story. It’s less jarring of a tonal shift than in From Dusk Till Dawn I guess, which went from murderers and rapists kidnapping a family to making jokes and shooting vampires with a penis gun, but in that case you had two different directors (Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino) working on their own halves. You can’t have lovecraftian horror while giving the audience a feeling of hope and human agency, otherwise it doesn’t work. Why be scared of hell if you can blow it the fuck up and be done with it.
One last thing I should mention: the characters suck ass. Once again, you can tell they’re doing the Alien thing (which is the slasher movie thing in a broader sense) by introducing a large cast of characters (typically falling into certain archetypes) that we’re meant to identify with and have an opinion on whether they live or die. Not so in Event Horizon, where the entire cast (aside from Larry Fishburne and maybe the comic relief character) manages to sidestep most common narrative tropes by not being interesting in the least. Even Stark, who was apparently the female lead the whole time and I never noticed, who had less dialogue than the other female character and actually did far less. Even Dr. Weir, the architect of the whole shitstorm and the character who logic would dictate is the dramatic centerpiece of the film doesn’t really do or say anything dramatic or interesting, and ultimately fizzles out into some kind of weak Pinhead ripoff. Except Pinhead was the fucking monster of Hellraiser, not even the main antagonist in a sense, so it didn’t really matter if he was one-dimensional or not. Weir invents a portal to the Cthuluverse, has visions of his wife committing suicide and claws out his own eyeballs and yet I could not give less of a shit if I tried. If you can’t even write a worthwhile scenario for ‘scientist falls victim to his own creation’, which is literally the oldest science-fiction story in the book, then you know you’ve got problems.
Still, sci-fi and horror films are not always the bastions of fantastic writing that we like to think they are, a lot of the time they’re just so the audience can marvel at the weird shit they see on the screen. So if you’re a people who is more interested in being entertained when watching movies than character archetypes and if it’s a ‘good’ story or not, then you might have some fun with Event Horizon. For all its flaws, it certainly is a spectacle.
I’m not liable for any eye-gouging that occurs during the viewing of this movie, by the way.
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