Netflix Instant Queue Fridays: Event Horizon
It never fails to amaze me how many people have missed out on this film. Usually written off as a shitty sci-fi flick, this film is actually a (good) horror film set in space. Though to be quite honest, just being in space itself is scary enough for me.
The story is pretty easy to follow, but is a step above the standard horror film. A large vessel known as the Event Horizon was sent out on a mission but never heard from again. Years have gone by and a signal is finally received from the missing ship. We follow the characters that comprise the rescue crew sent to answer the mysterious call. Folks board ship, find out a bunch of evil shit is going on, get killed, etc.
One thing to note is that this movie inspired the game Dead Space in MANY ways. The plot alone probably rang a few bells with you if you have played through the game. It is a testament to just how great this film is, and why it has long been one of my favorite horror movies. The acting is top notch, with very little of the usual horror cheesiness. What this movie does provide is a strong sense of creepiness that is missing from a lot of the films we see today. You’ve got a bunch of folks stuck in deep space aboard a ship full of all kinds of evil, nobody is coming to save their ass and there is nowhere for them to go aside from the deep, dark, cold expanse known as space.
Now that I have caused myself to have my usual space-related fear-tremors, I’ll wrap it up by adding that you have some solid acting (Laurence Fishburne and Sam Neill star), brief tits, and some solid gore. This is a lock for my Halloween viewing, and I recommend it be one for yours as well.
Oh man this movie is great! It has been one of my favorite horror flicks for several years and I always recommend it to others looking to watch a movie that inspires genuine fear, instead of simple “pop around the corner” type startles. Definitely brutal.
A lot of people write it off, but this really is a fine film. One of the gold standards of horror films.
“Usually written off as a shitty sci-fi flick”
It’s usually written off this way because it is a shitty sci-fi flick…
I have to admit that the theme and premise are very cool. It had tons of potential and there are so many ways that it could have been done well. The fact of the matter; however, is that, like with many other expensive sci-fi flicks, the producers decided not to focus on plot development and instead tried to simply go for a frightening atmosphere with lots of jump scares and horror imagery. You see this all over the place with sci-fi over the last couple decades. In my opinion, it is a symptom of movies like this one not actually being sci-fi films. This could more accurately be labeled a horror flick, since it really is all about the horror and not at all about “science” or “fiction. I say this because science, coming from Latin “scio” meaning to know, implies that there should be a focus on knowledge, information, technology, theory, possibly philosophy, and thought. None of these themes are developed to any appreciable length. Fiction, which comes from Latin “fictum” which means creation, implies that there should also be some kind of development in the way creating a story. On the contrary, we see very little development of the main theme of the ship being lost on its mission, and instead we mostly zero in on people being murdered all over the place. There is, granted, a little explanation, at the end, as to where the ship was and what happened to it, but it really doesn’t serve to develop any intrigue or story, rather it expounds some history to explain why people are being murdered and then it returns to the horror imagery before it plays us out.
I guess I can see why someone could like this film, assuming that they really like the horror genre, but it bothered me way back when I first saw it, because I was expecting a good science fiction flick. If I’m watching a flash horror film, then just label it horror and nothing else. Furthermore, I’ve seen this labeled as Mystery, too. Can we really say there was Mystery involved? Perhaps there was for the first quarter of the film when one is still wondering what will be found in the ship, but the problem is that nothing that moves the story really does become found and the intrigue peters out as people start dying. It’s somewhat reminiscent of Sphere in that way. They could have found anything on the ship in that movie, and what they found was pretty cool, but it doomed the larger portion of the rest of that film to mainly horror scenes and deaths. That movie, however, was pretty good, and it did still focus on science fiction themes while having some mystery that was developed, so I’d call it a better stand in for this film in spirit.
That’s my two cents.
I also consider it to be a horror film. I did say it was usually considered a “shitty sci-fi flick” because as a science-fiction film it falls pretty flat. Also, I consider most sci-fi movies in general to be shitty. It was always a genre that I think exists better in book form… except for 2001 and a few other films here and there.
Besides, I’ve still never been able to get over all the noise in space.
I’ve never been able to get over the lack of noise in space… because, in space, no one hears you scream.
Yeah, I didn’t mean to argue against your point. I think you hit the nail on the head by saying it was a horror film, and I meant to elaborate on that, but I probably came off snarky. My main additional complaint is that they advertised and marketed this film as science fiction and that kind of thing annoys me. It leads to a waste of time in many cases.
I hardly ever come across any good sci-fi movies. The television medium seems to handle it a lot better with shows like Star Trek. Sphere, like I mentioned, does an alright job, and you might like that one if you like movies with a horror twist that have some sci-fi to them. Another good one is the Stargate movie, but that was better expressed in television form too. I can’t think of too many others right off the top of my head. Alien, perhaps? Clearly the movie industry needs to do some work in this area.
Alien was one of the better sci-fi films, along with 2001 as I had mentioned. It’s a genre I really enjoy in book form, and I do wish there were some better films. Not sure how much demand there is for such a thing though.
A similar movie you can stream on Netflix is “Pandorum”, I thought it was better than this in some ways.
I just wanted to add some trivia to this thread, because you say that you like this movie, and I just rewatched it today and noticed a really funny mistake.
They have the one character speak Latin on the recording that they picked up from the ship, as you may recall. The funny thing about it is that they completely screwed up the Latin. I’ve seen this kind of thing before. Hollywood doesn’t try very hard to get its use of ancient languages correct because they know that no one will notice, so it gives me a chuckle when these scenes predictably end up going wrong each time.
Anyway, here is what the guy says: “Liberate tute me ex inferis.” That sentence has all kinds of things wrong with it. Technically I would write it out like this: “Libera te ab infernis”. Their sentence says something like “all of you save thyself(nominative) up from below.” The word “liberate” would be a plural, but it is referring to a singular, so it should be “libera”. “Tute” is completely inappropriate here, because it is nominative when it should be the object of the sentence, thus accusative, and it is also somewhat exaggerated and unusual. I translate it as “thyself” in the above, because it is the object of a plural verb, but is singular. The idea is that the two do not match, and in old English “thyself” would be a singular form. “Te” fits better as the object, and is more normal Latin. “Me” is thrown in there afterward, and that should not be there at all; it just makes no sense. The choice of “ex” over “ab” is actually defensible. “Ex” means up from, while “ab” means away from. Typically you use “ab” when talking about motion away from some place, but it is possible that he meant to say that they should save themselves with an upward motion, since hell is understood to be a lower place. “Inferis” is wrong. The word should be “infernis”, which means hell. The previous would actually just mean beneath, and is where we get the word “inferior”.
Anyway, I hope that someone enjoys that. I always get a kick out of these things.
Stop being so emo barbie, it’s not that deep big guy.
Hmm, someone doesn’t appreciate Latin. :\