“There are bad movies that you know are enjoyable because they’re bad.
There are bad movies that you know are bad and that you shouldn’t like, but you can’t help yourself.
Then…there are, very occasionally, bad movies that everyone else seems to think are bad, but they’re really not that bad. Or maybe you’ve got a soft spot for them, or there’s a nostalgia goggles thing happening.
Okay, Event Horizon is not great. It’s not great cinema. It’s also not great the way something like Dawn of the Dead is great, even though it probably won’t make a lot of lists of great films or whatever.
I want to say some things that are good about the movie:
Space and Supernatural: Yeah, these never seem to work together. Whenever a slasher goes to space, it’s over. It’s probably 2 movies into being over, TBH. Although I think Dead Space worked, as a game, and Doom. But again, I don’t know, as a movie, it never seems to work. However, I appreciate the taking a swing at it, and I think it’s possible to make it work. I mean, if there is something supernatural, we will have reached The Moon before we have evidence of it, and it would seem possible in a vast universe that something really awful is out there, no?
Folding Space: the explanation for how the Event Horizon folds space was ripped off by Interstellar AND Stranger Things. It’s a pretty clean, simple explanation that works.
The Hauntings: I think some force that, to us, comes off as supernatural, and then terrorizes people with their own embedded fears, I think that works.
The Cast: The cast is good! I don’t know if they shine in this movie, but that’s a solid cast. Laurence Fishburne was just about to have a comeback with probably his biggest role only shortly after this.
We’re Leaving: I love that Laurence Fishburne turns off the video of the previous crew being murdered or whatever, and he’s just like, “We’re leaving.” That’s realistic, and I wish that happened in more horror movies.
The Look: I liked how things look. Okay, yes, it makes no sense. Who would design a spaceship to look like that? With spikes and a deadly tunnel and all that? Although, to the movie’s credit, nobody gets chopped up in that tunnel. Maybe that’s not to the movie’s credit? I dunno, y’all seem to like when Rian Johnson does that subverting expectations shit, so why not here? I think it works in horror because the tropes are just so silly and firm.
96 minutes: Looklooklook, saying a movie is short is a backhanded compliment, but this kind of movie should never be longer than 100 minutes, I don’t give a shit.
Fixes:
1997: I blame the year 1997 for the Cooper character being a refugee from another, even stupider movie. I think in 1997 it was like, you had to have a comic relief character, even if that messes up the tone of the movie.
Simpler: I don’t know how this works, like…this bodiless monster thing is haunting the ship and taking over Sam Neil and shit, but to what end? It wants to kill everyone, but also to take them to hell dimension or something to torture them…for why? You could either just completely forgo an explanation, OR you could make this simpler…you could do this a lot of ways, but I think making it a little simpler and clearer in terms of how this works, or just acknowledging that fuck it, we don’t care, we’re just trying to get out of here, that works too. Simpler is never worse.
Cut: Let’s cut this cast way down. We don’t need this many people to keep track of all the time.
Secret Asshole: maybe this plot is overdone now…but if Sam Neil were a secret asshole, who knew the Event Horizon went somewhere fucked up and who’s purpose was to retrieve the ship and some information or something he expected to find as a result of the ship moving into that other place, that gives us A) a reason for Sam Neil to go bad, and B) higher stakes than this one crew. “