Director: Paul W.S. Anderson
Writer: Philip Eisner
Stars: Laurence Fishburne, Sam Neill, Kathleen Quinlan
1 hour, 36 minutes
We are told that in 2015, the first manned colony is founded on the moon. In 2032, mining operations begin on Mars. In 2040 the ship “Event Horizon” disappears beyond Neptune. This is 2047.
Weir wakes up and looks out the window. He’s on a huge space station orbiting Earth. He’s told to report to the “Lewis and Clark” a search and rescue ship on a top-secret mission. He gets walked through the procedure for using the grav-couch. Fifty-six days later, they arrive at their destination. Weir wakes up and thinks he hears voices, but he’s the only one who’s awake. Then they actually wake him up; it was just a dream.
We meet the crew, and listen as Weir briefs them on their mission. They’ve found the Event Horizon, and their job is to recover it and find where they’ve been for the last seven years. The Event Horizon was created to travel faster than light, through a dimensional gateway, and they want to know what happened. He’s the one who built the gravity drive. They were ready to test the engines and then just disappeared. They have a recording of bunch of noise and screaming, except for a little bit of Latin.
They just about run into the ship hidden within Neptune’s clouds, but it seems intact. They go inside. The captain asks why there are explosives all over the deck, and Weir explains that the ship can be split in two in an emergency. They find a body, and then they restore power to the ship. The gravity drive powers up, and Justin the engineer gets sucked into it.
There’s a major explosion on the Lewis and Clark. They all have to evacuate to the Event Horizon. They restore gravity, and start repairing. They only have enough air for twenty hours. They find some kind of blood-like biological glop spread all over the walls. Justin seems comatose.
Weir explains that the ship creates a black hole and uses its immense power to bend spacetime. Weir insists that the gateway cannot open by itself, but Cooper insists that’s what he saw happen to Justin.
The doctor hallucinates her son, but he’s not real. Weir crawls into a little tunnel to repair a burnout, and when the lights go out, he sees his wife with no eyes. The Captain sees a burning man come up out of the pit around the core.
The pilot, Smith, yells at Weir, “Did you break all the laws of physics and you didn’t think there’d be a price!” And he attacks Weir. Stark thinks the ship is “alive” and the visions are a sort of defense mechanism, but the Captain doesn’t accept that.
Justin gets in the airlock without a suit. “It shows you things. Horrible things.” He hits the button, and then the real Justin wakes up. Why have a thirty second delay to open the door if it can’t be cancelled? They put him in stasis. They now have four hours left.
Weir says he doesn’t know where the ship has been for seven years. The captain thinks the ship gets inside your head and shows you things that it knows will scare you. DJ thinks the ship has gone beyond this universe, it’s been outside reality. The recording really said, “Save yourselves… from Hell!” Could the ship have actually been in literal Hell for seven years? They finally decode the black box recording, and yeah, it looks like Hell.
Captain Miller decides to destroy the ship. The ship starts fighting back. It tricks the doctor into following a hallucination and falling into a deep pit. Weir watches his wife slit her own wrists. The ship tells Weir he’ll never be alone again, because he’s with her. Weir pokes his own eyes out.
Smith sees Weir on the Clark, and Miller notices the explosives are missing. It’s too late; the ship explodes, killing Smith and Cooper and leaving everyone else stranded on the Event Horizon. Weir kills DJ. Captain Miller finds Stark. Weir explains that the ship has crossed over to a dimension of pure chaos, and now she’s alive. He sets the gravity drive to activate in ten minutes. Cooper makes it back, but Weir blows him off the ship. Weir is sucked out into the void, but Miller pulls himself and Stark through a door.
Cooper comes back in through the airlock. He’s hard a hard day. Miller wants to split the ship, get away from the core, and fly home. They need to hurry as the core is going to activate in a matter of minutes. Weir is back, and he confronts Miller. He shows Miller scenes that look like they came straight out of “Hellraiser.” Miller detonates the explosives, splitting off the two halves of the ship.
The core activates and takes the rear half of the ship with it. Cooper and Stark watch from the front half.
72 days later, they are rescued.
Commentary
It’s a really good-looking science-fiction movie. The sets, effects, and acting are all excellent. For twenty-two years, I’ve hated this as a really bad sci-fi movie, but now, looking at it from purely a horror perspective, it’s actually very good. It really is like Hellraiser in space. None of the science makes any real sense, and that has always been my major gripe with it, but if you just take it for what is said without too much thought, it works well from that point of view.