It was lonely at home & late in the night, I decided to watch some TV & doze off. Unfortunately I flipped on HBO & they were playing Event Horizon. By the end of the movie not only was I awestruck & scared out of my wits, the entire night I was up thinking about the movie. Usually I watch a movie after reading the reviews, hearing comments from friends etc. This was a shocker for me.
Its not every day you see a good mix of science fiction & horror. Of course it was the screen presence of Laurence Fishburne & Sam Neill that first made me stop channel surfing but the rest of the cast too did an excellent job as far as acting was concerned. But it was the subtle development of the plot that did the trick. The movie starts off in the year 2047 with a rescue & salvage mission of a ship the ’’Event Horizon’’ which mysteriously disappears during its maiden voyage & then reappears after 7 years. The Event Horizon was an attempt to perform space hops (jump from one point in space to another immediately without actually burning fuel & traveling that distance).
Along with the salvage team they have Dr. William Weir (Sam Neill) who obviously knows more than he is ready to disclose. The rest of the team (& the movie for that matter) has Capt. Miller (Laurence Fishburne) who is cool, composed & ready to see the reason beyond the logics. As the crew tries to find out what happened to the crew & where the ship has been for the last seven years the answers, unpleasant as they are, only lead to more darker questions.
The crew soon suspects that they would need a salvage team themselves. And even worse, someone or something does not want them to leave. Alive, anyway. The visuals & sound are beautifully intertwined in this horror classic. Not to the visually gross scale but good enough to send shock waves down your spine. Laurence Fishburne shows us hints of the man we know as Morpheus in the Matrix. Sam Neill was there but actually falls short in making a lasting impact.
The screenplay was good considering that I was seeing it on TV with commercials and all & still felt the movie was scary enough. The facts open up one by one evenly throughout the movie & not in one sudden shocker (as revealed by scary old granny/grandpa giving a scarier story & warning as seen in a normal horror flick). On the whole a very good movie especially if you are a sci-fi & horror fan.
Just be warned don’t see it alone, at night esp. if you would like to sleep after seeing it!!