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Event Horizon
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Event Horizon is likely to be
dismissed in some quarters as a mere knock-off of Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) – which indeed spawned many
sequels and imitations. But director Paul Anderson (Shopping [1994], Mortal Kombat [1995])
gives the formula some new twists and flavours, beginning with the thundering,
atonal techno music over the opening credits.
That clamour sets the tone of the piece. A crack team
of professional space jockeys, led by Miller (Laurence Fishburne), searches
space for a vessel, named the Event Horizon, missing in action. This team
constitutes a veritable Rainbow Coalition of skin colours, religious beliefs,
political ideologies, temperaments and musical tastes. As their guide, they
have the creator of the advanced technology on the elusive craft, suspiciously
fanatical scientist Weir (Sam Neill). Finally aboard the errant ship, they realise
it is devoid of human life, but strangely pulsates with some mysterious alien
form clearly summoned forth (from a black, black hole) by Weir’s “gravity
drive”, a top-secret contraption that allows faster-than-light travel.
Once it dispenses with its preliminary,
pseudo-scientific gobbledegook, Event
Horizon gets down to its properly Gothic agenda. The vision of other-worldly
life operative here is pure Clive Barker: beyond our puny civilisation, the
cosmos hosts only “chaos and evil”! The spectre of H.P. Lovecraft, and his
various mutations within contemporary pop culture, is never far away. With a
nod to that other benchmark of contemporary trippy SF, the Polish novel (1961)
and Russian film (1972) of Solaris,
Anderson and writer Philip Eisner give their amorphous, malevolent being the
power to read mortal minds, and also materialise every character’s most
gruesome fears in hallucinatory flashes. Like John Carpenter’s creatures in The Thing (1982) or The Fog (1980), this beast is immaterial, ever-present – like some
vapour that can penetrate and then transform every bodily border.
This is a tense, proficient and (in particular) gory
movie – and I say that with some nostalgia. Gore – nitty-gritty. blood-and-guts
stuff – is a neglected, underestimated part of cinema history. It began in the
1960s Z movie and underground ghettos, briefly resurfacing and flourishing in near-mainstream
horror and fantasy films of the ‘80s. Subsequently, gore was reviled as the
sign of “gratuitous violence” (whatever that is) in mass culture, and largely
driven underground once more. Until, that is, the appearance of this handsome,
stomach-churning movie.
There is much in Event
Horizon that impresses. (The fact that emerged later of 35 minutes cut –
and then lost forever – by Paramount before its initial hasty release was
complete news to me: I didn’t get the sense, while innocently watching it in
‘97, that anything was missing.) The ensemble cast, including Joely Richardson
and Sean Pertwee, clicks well. Neill, often a hammy, ill-pitched performer, is
dialled down to a quiet, sinister level of menace. Moments of humour to break
the horror-flow are well placed.
And, just as it is unafraid to plumb the depths of
gore, the film is equally proud of its capacity to provide many rude,
old-fashioned shocks: loud noises, sudden edits and murky apparitions that
prime our feverish imaginations for the worst yet to come.
MORE Anderson: Alien vs. Predator © Adrian Martin October 1997 |
