Review of Event Horizon (1997) by Bcollins39302 — 30 Aug 2013

The movie wasn't quite as bad as many of the critics claimed, but the dialogue was very cliche and corny, especially at the beginning of the movie. The creators probably did get some of their ideas of a psychological space thriller from ancient corny Soviet 60s films, which are utterly unwatchable for people like me who are used to better cinematography, such as Solaris, but the plot of this film was clearly different.

This film was easily the scariest Sci Fi film I have seen. The liters of blood being spilt were probably a bit too much, but it had its impact. The way that the story went on without really explaining itself, or what it was exactly that was getting into people's minds and killing them, added to the horror.

Many critics pointed out that the atmosphere and technology of the Event Horizon was starkly different from the rescue ship, I agree. It was unexplainably different, and looked like something that belonged on a stereotypical alien spaceship as it looked so different. There were many Gothic-esque spikes located all around the FTL engine, and the access tunnels in the engine room were all bizarrely colored, with green and blue glows.

Some critics complained about the fact that Dr. Weir had to explain to the crew how his faster than light engine worked, because they should have known more about elementary physics, seeing as they work in space. I disagree, most of the main characters were more of the very expendable "Space Soldier" mold of space explorers from Stargate, Alien II, or Starship Troopers, and had plenty of applied engineering, medical, or combat expertise, but they were not the contemporary highly educated and decorated astronauts of our time. This movie, like Alien II (in comparison to Alien (I)), is set in a time when space exploration is commonplace, so the people doing the exploring are not necessarily highly intelligent or educated, and have to be easily replaceable by other trained, but not very educated, personnel due to the fact that space accidents are happening all the time.

The common complaint I understand the least is the one that says something along the lines of "We never even found out exactly what happened to the crew of the Event Horizon 7 years earlier!". Did you not watch the part of the movie where they fixed the log, and played the recording of the crew dying? They clearly did not survive, and died in unimaginable circumstances. When they found the ship 7 years later, it was extremely cold, and life support was not on. Do people really mean "We never found out what happened to all but one of the bodies if the original crew..."? That is never explicitly explained (you could speculate that they got vented into space, or sucked into the liquid around the FTL engine). The movie clearly, and graphically shows exactly what happened to the original crew, and some lines towards the end of the movie also confirm this.