That makes one of his most dramatic statements, late in the film, inexplicable. Without revealing too much of the ending, let me say that Weir presumably knows as little from personal experience about what lies on the other side of the gravity drive as anyone else in the movie. One of the crew members approaches the gravity drive, which turns into something resembling liquid mercury, and he slips through it and later returns, babbling, "It shows you things-horrible things-the dark inside me from the other place. But while Tarkovsky was combining the subconscious with the Gaia hypothesis, "Event Horizon'' uses the flashbacks mostly for shocks and false alarms (hey, that's not really your daughter under the plastic tent in the equipment room!).īecause sensors picked up signs of life all over the ship, we assume it has been inhabited by a life form from wherever the ship traveled. Same thing happens in "Event Horizon,'' where the crew members hallucinate about family members they miss, love or feel guilty about. The planet in that film is apparently alive, and creates hallucinations in the minds of the orbiters, making them think they're back on Earth with their families. The obvious inspiration for "Event Horizon'' is a much better film, Andrei Tarkovsky's " Solaris" (1972), where a space station orbits a vast planet. And although we are treated to very nice shots of Neptune, the crew members never look at the planet in awe, or react to the wondrous sight like the actors standing next to the open airplane door in "Air Force One,'' they're so intent on their dialogue they're oblivious to their surroundings. But once those effects are exploited, the rest of the movie takes place in the calm of space. The rules change with every scene.įor example, early in the film the Lewis and Clark approaches the Event Horizon through what I guess is the stormy atmosphere of Neptune, with lots of thunder, lightning and turbulence. It's all style, climax and special effects. So, OK, where did the ship go for seven years, and what happened while it was there? Why is the original crew all dead? Unfortunately, "Event Horizon'' is not the movie to answer these questions. They're a highly trained space crew, on a mission where space and time are bread and butter, yet they apparently know less about quantum theory than the readers of this review. The crew members nod, listening attentively. Weir performs the obligatory freshman-level explanation of this procedure, taking a piece of paper and showing you how far it is from one edge to the other, and then folding it in half so that the two edges touch, and explaining how that happens when space curves. The drive apparently creates a black hole and then slips the ship through it, so that it can travel vast distances in a second.ĭr. He designed the ship's gravity drive, which looks uncannily like a smaller version of the Machine in " Contact," with three metal rings whirling around a central core. What happened to the ship named Event Horizon? Dr. I liked all of that stuff, but there wasn't much substance beneath it. Peterman is still in business half a century from now. And the captain ( Laurence Fishburne) wears a leather bomber jacket, indicating that J. I appreciate the anachronistic details: Everybody on board the rescue ship smokes, for example, which is unlikely in 2047 on a deep space mission where, later, the CO2 air scrubbers will play a crucial role. I got up and moved closer to the screen, volunteering to be drawn in.
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