Event Horizon Movie Review

Event Horizon (1997)

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Written by: Philip Eisner 
Directed by: Paul W.S. Anderson
Starring: Laurence Fishburne, Sam Neill, Kathleen Quinlan, Joely Richardson, Jason Isaacs
Rated: R
Watch the trailer

Plot
A rescue crew is tasked with investigating the mysterious reappearance of a spaceship that had been lost for seven years.

Verdict
The perils of advanced space travel mean that sometimes you open a portal to hell. The crew attempts to retrieve a ship that experienced an unknown accident and vanished. We don't know the machinations controlling the ship, but the mission becomes a nightmare. It's unsettling as fears manifest in reality. The crew must fight the ship and in turn each other. The second half of this movie is a rather generic escape, undermining the initial setup.
Skip it.

Review
I always mix up this and Sphere (1998), likely as both have spheres at the core of the ship. This one is the sci-fi horror movie.

This begins in 2047 where Earth has a colony on the Moon and a mine on Mars. Seven years earlier a deep space research vessel disappeared beyond Neptune. It just reappeared.

Weir (Sam Neill) developed the experimental warp drive for the ship in question, Event Horizon. This is sci-fi horror from nearly  the beginning as Weir has nightmares. It seems his wife died. While Weir is excited to see his ship, the rest of the team drafted to accompany him led by Miller (Laurence Fishburne) don't share the same fervor. They were on break and called into action on emergency orders.

Sam Neill plays Weir

The Event Horizon seems abandoned, but the warp drive activates, unleashing a shock wave that damages Miller's ship. The crew is forced to board the Event Horizon during repairs. While none of them like it, they don't have a choice. The warp drive uses a black hole to travel across space and time, at least that's the concept. Just after the ship activated the drive, it disappeared. Weir assures the crew the drive is safe despite all the reasons to the contrary. If the ship disappeared on the first use of the warp drive, I have to strongly disagree that it's safe. Miller points out their ship is damaged and a crew member is unconscious. I wasn't sure if Weir was in denial or had an ulterior motive. He's not stupid. He has to know there's danger. Does it come down to ego, wanting to prove his invention worked?

Sam Neill, Laurence Fishburne, Sean Pertwee play Weir, Miller, Smitty

After two crew members have hallucination, we know something is up with the ship. It has to be the warp drive. Weir denies he saw anything, but everyone is on edge as they've all had a vision of something that isn't real even if they don't admit it. Weir knows more than he's telling them.

This reminds of of a Stephen King short story, The Jaunt (1985). Instantaneous travel is developed, but it only works if you're unconscious. Conscious mice sent through die, sedated they're fine. If you attempt to transport while awake it feels much longer, driving you mad. The character at the center of the story that went through the portal conscious madly screams on the other side "Longer than you think!" before clawing out his eyes. It seems like inspiration for this movie.

The warp drive

One of the crew members talks about the darkness inside himself, feeling compelled to stop it. A message from the original crew talks about the darkness and Hell. This warp drive opens up some kind of portal to hell where it taps into the crew's fears. Weir completely loses touch with reality. While it's never stated, I feel like he had an inkling of something amiss. I wonder if once he realized what the drive did, he saw it as a way to reunite with his wife in some depraved way. The question is at what point he realized the ship opened a portal to another dimension. Through him, we can guess what happened to the original crew of the ship. The visions of his wife break him. He's already feeling guilty, and from there he blindly embraces what this ship has become.

What's left of Miller's crew has to either stop Weir or destroy the gravity drive. By that point, Weir might as well be some kind of monster from a horror movie.