Event Horizon (film)

This article is about the 1997 British-American Movie. For general relativity, see Event horizon. For other uses, see Event horizon.

Event Horizon
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Paul Anderson
Produced by	Lawrence Gordon Lloyd Levin Jeremy Bolt
Written by	Philip Eisner Andrew Kevin Walker (uncredited)
Starring	Laurence Fishburne Sam Neill Kathleen Quinlan Joely Richardson
Music by	Michael Kamen Orbital
Cinematography	Adrian Biddle
Edited by	Martin Hunter
Production company	Paramount Pictures Golar Productions Impact Pictures
Distributed by	Paramount Pictures
Release dates	August 15, 1997 (1997-08-15) (United States) August 22, 1997 (1997-08-22) (United Kingdom)
Running time	95 minutes
Country	United Kingdom United States
Language	English
Budget	$60 million
Box office	$26.7 million

Event Horizon is a 1997 British-American science fiction horror film. The screenplay was written by Philip Eisner, with an uncredited rewrite by Andrew Kevin Walker, and directed by Paul W. S. Anderson. The film stars Laurence Fishburne and Sam Neill.

Event Horizon received negative reviews upon release with most critics comparing the film to Alien, Hellraiser, The Black Hole, Solaris, Star Trek, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. The film was also a box office bomb, grossing $26.7 million against a $60 million production budget. In recent years though, in a similar fashion to Blade Runner and John Carpenter's The Thing, it has come to be regarded as a unique contribution to the sci-fi genre with positive contemporary reviews.

Plot

In 2047, a distress signal is received from the Event Horizon, a starship that disappeared during its maiden voyage to Proxima Centauri seven years before. The rescue vessel Lewis and Clark is dispatched on a rescue mission. On board are Captain Miller and his crew – Lieutenant Starck, Pilot Smith, Medical Technician Peters, Engineer Ensign Justin, Trauma Doctor D.J., and Rescue Technician Cooper. They are joined by the Event Horizon's designer, Dr. William Weir. The Doctor briefs the crew, telling them that the Event Horizon was built to test an experimental gravity drive. The drive generates an artificial black hole and uses it to bridge two points in spacetime, reducing travel time over astronomical distances.

Upon boarding the Event Horizon, the crew finds evidence of a massacre. As they search for survivors, the ship's gravity drive automatically activates. Justin is briefly pulled into the resulting portal. As he is pulled out, he is in a catatonic state, terrified by what he saw on the other side. After he attempts suicide, the crew places him in stasis. At the same time, the activation causes a shock wave that damages the Lewis and Clark, forcing the entire crew to board the Event Horizon.

The team begin to experience hallucinations corresponding to their fears and regrets: Miller sees Corrick, a subordinate he was forced to abandon to his death; Peters sees her son with his legs covered in bloody lesions; and Weir sees his late wife, with missing eyes, urging him to join her. They soon discover a video log of the Event Horizon's crew as they went insane and mutilated each other. The video log ends with a shot of the Event Horizon's captain, who has apparently gouged out his own eyes, holding them up to the camera and saying in Latin, "liberate tuteme ex inferis" (lit. "save yourself from hell"). Miller and D.J. deduce that the ship's gravity drive opened a gateway into a dimension outside the known universe. Weir theorizes that this hellish dimension turned the Event Horizon into a sentient being, which torments its occupants and lures them back to hell.

Miller decides to destroy the Event Horizon. Weir, now possessed by the evil presence, uses an explosive device to destroy the Lewis and Clark. The explosion kills Smith and blasts Cooper off into space. Peters is lured to her death by a hallucination of her son. Weir kills D.J. by vivisecting him and corners Starck on the bridge. Miller confronts Weir, who overpowers him and initiates a 10-minute countdown, after which the Event Horizon will return to the other dimension.

Cooper, having used his space suit's oxygen supply to propel himself back to the ship, appears at the bridge window. Without thinking, Weir shoots at him, breaking the window, and is blown out into space by the ensuing decompression. Miller, Starck, and Cooper survive and manage to seal off the ship's bridge. With their own ship destroyed, Miller plans to split the Event Horizon in two and use the forward section of the ship as a lifeboat. He is attacked by manifestations of Corrick and a resurrected Weir. Miller fights them off and detonates the explosives, sacrificing himself.

The gravity drive activates, pulling the ship's rear section into a black hole. Starck and Cooper enter stasis, beside a comatose Justin, and wait to be rescued. Seventy-two days later, The Event Horizon is boarded by a rescue party, who discover the remaining crew still in stasis. A newly awakened Starck is comforted by Cooper, but then sees Weir posing as one of the rescuers. As Cooper restrains the terrified Starck and one of the rescuers calls for a sedative, the doors ominously close.

Cast

• Laurence Fishburne as Captain Miller, Commanding Officer of the Lewis & Clark
• Sam Neill as Dr. William Weir, designer of the Event Horizon
• Joely Richardson as Lieutenant Starck, Executive Officer of the Lewis & Clark
• Jason Isaacs as D.J., Medical Doctor of the Lewis & Clark
• Sean Pertwee as Smith, Pilot of the Lewis & Clark
• Richard T. Jones as Cooper, Rescue Technician of the Lewis & Clark
• Kathleen Quinlan as Peters, Medical Technician of the Lewis & Clark
• Jack Noseworthy as Ensign Justin, Chief Engineer of the Lewis & Clark
• Noah Huntley as Edmund Corrick, Miller's former shipmate from the Goliath
• Peter Marinker as Captain John Kilpack, Commanding Officer of the Event Horizon
• Holley Chant as Claire Weir, Dr. Weir's wife
• Barclay Wright as Denny Peters, son of Technician Peters
• Robert Jezek as Rescue Technician, rescues the survivors of the Lewis & Clark

Production

After directing the successful Mortal Kombat in 1995, Anderson was offered the job. The release date had already been set and Anderson agreed, despite that the deadline meant that the post-production period was severely reduced. On the commentary, Anderson cites this as the main cause for the many troubles faced during production and especially when Anderson was to make decisions on the final cut.

In the film's commentary, Anderson mentions the wish he had to direct an R-rated picture after the PG-13 rated Mortal Kombat and also mentions that he turned down the opportunity to direct Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, Alien: Resurrection, and X-Men in order to make Event Horizon.

Deleted footage

Directors usually have a standard 10-week editing period to produce the first cut of a movie, as guaranteed by the Directors Guild of America. However, due to the short production schedule of the movie, the rapidly approaching release date, and the fact that principal photography was still not finished, Anderson agreed with the Paramount studio to an editing period of six weeks and promised to deliver the film for release in August 1997, as Paramount wanted to have a hit movie before Titanic, which they were going to release in September. When the main unit wrapped, Anderson was supposed to start editing the movie, but he still had to shoot two weeks of film with the second unit, effectively shortening the time he could spend in post production to just four weeks. In this short time, only a rough cut of the movie could be assembled. Anderson notes that at two hours and 10 minutes, it was overly long, with weak directing and acting that could have used a further editing pass, unfinished special effects and a poor sound mix.

In test screenings the cut was poorly received. There were complaints about the extreme amount of gore, and Anderson and producer Jeremy Bolt claim members of the test audience fainted during the screening. Paramount, which had stopped looking at the dailies before any of the gore was shot and were seeing the complete movie for the first time along with the audience, were similarly shocked by how gruesome it was and demanded a shorter length time with a decreased amount of gore.

Anderson believes that while his first cut was justifiably long, Paramount forced him to make a cut that was too short and that would benefit by restoring around 10 minutes of missing footage, including some of its gore. After a successful initial DVD release, the studio and Anderson became interested in assembling a director's cut but they quickly found out that the excised footage had not been carefully stored and that much of it had gone missing. Some of the footage was located in a salt mine in Transylvania in bad condition. The plan to assemble a director's cut was abandoned and instead a Special Edition two-DVD set was released that featured one deleted scene, two extended scenes, and a few shots of deleted material in the included making-of. The footage is of "video" quality.

Known deleted scenes include a meeting scene between Weir and people in charge of the mission in which they discuss Event Horizon, some dialogue of which remained present in the theatrical trailer; more backstory for Cooper and Justin, including a stronger explanation for Justin entering the black hole; a deleted backstory of the relationship between Starck and Miller; additional scenes explaining what the gateway to hell/black hole is; Miller finding a tooth floating in Event Horizon, a longer version of the scene in which Peters hallucinates that her son's mangled legs are covered in maggots; a scene in which Weir hallucinates that Justin turns into his wife Claire; a bloodier version of Weir's wife's Claire suicide; a longer version of the scene where Miller finds D.J's dead body with his guts on the table; and a longer version of the "Visions From Hell" scene during Miller's final fight with Weir with more shots of Event Horizon crew being tortured.

The "bloody orgy" video was also longer. As Anderson was sometimes too busy filming other scenes, second unit director Vadim Jean filmed some parts of this scene. Real-life amputees were used for special effects scenes in which Event Horizon crew members were mutilated, and porn actors were hired to make the sex and rape scenes more realistic and graphic.

The film's final ending was a combination of two unused alternate endings that were filmed. One didn't have a jump scare at the end when the last two survivors are found by another rescue crew and Starck hallucinates that she sees Weir, although there was a similar version of the scene included in this ending where she hears screams of Event Horizon crew and screams in fear before Cooper wakes her up. This was the original ending of the movie included in the shooting script. The second ending had Miller fighting with the burned man from his visions at the core instead of with Weir, but this was changed due to the negative test screening.

In an Event Horizon Q&A in 2011, Anderson was asked when extra footage will be made available. He responded "never", explaining that much of it is gone forever. However, in a 2012 interview he announced that producer Lloyd Levin had found a VHS tape with his original rough cut. Anderson said that after finishing Resident Evil: Retribution, he planned to watch this rough cut for the first time since assembling the film.

Music

Michael Kamen was hired to compose the score for the film. Director Paul W. S. Anderson, a fan of hybrid genre music, invited the electronic dance music duo Orbital to collaborate with Kamen and to provide synthesizing sounds for the film's unsettling atmosphere.

A soundtrack album was released which edited various cues from the score into four tracks of approximately ten minutes.

Reception

Critical reception

The film received generally negative reviews. Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a rating of 24% based on reviews from 37 critics whereas on Metacritic it scored a rating of 35. Critics praised its visuals, the cast, Anderson's direction paying homage to films like Alien and The Shining and especially its production design and moody atmosphere while feeling that the third act is anti-climactic with many questions remaining unanswered.

Roger Ebert gave the film a negative review giving the film 2 stars out of 4, stating, "The script creates a sense of foreboding and afterboding, but no actual boding." Washington Post critic Stephen Hunter wrote,"If you want to have that Event Horizon experience without spending the seven bucks, try this instead: Put a bucket on your head. Have a loved one beat on it vigorously with a wrench for 100 minutes. Same difference, and think of the gas you'll save".

On the other hand, the film originally had its supporters, with Empire magazine awarding Event Horizon a 3 out of 5 stars rating, reporting: "That the film never fulfils its promise is down to its over reliance on horror vagaries in a precision-built sci-fi milieu, ultimately leaving too many unanswered queries. A sharper script and a more credible solution could have turned this impressive hokum into a force to be reckoned with". Additionally, Total Film also gave it a score of 3 out of 5 stars, stating that "Excellent special effects and an Alien-esque feel make this supernatural horror film ("The Shining in space," as most critics have called it, pretty accurately) well worth a look. There are certainly plenty of jumps on offer as a possessed ship torments and tortures any humans it can find. Well worth a look.". Entertainment Weekly gave it a B-, stating, "Just when you’ve written off this deep-space nightmare as a late-summer melange of Alien, Fantastic Voyage, The Shining, and a dozen more forgettable otherworldly thrillers, it unleashes some of the most unsettling horror imagery in years", whereas the Time Out magazine mentioned that "despite its shortcomings, this is never dull. The movie avoids Alien space monster clichés brilliantly and the soundtrack contains more of the 'Boo!' effects than I've heard since Halloween."

Box office

Event Horizon was a commercial failure. Domestically the film only grossed $26,616,590 and $20,400,000 internationally for a total of $47,073,851 failing to recoup its estimated $60 million production budget.

See also

• List of films featuring space stations

External links

• Event Horizon at IMDb
• Event Horizon at AllMovie
• Event Horizon at Rotten Tomatoes
• Event Horizon at Box Office Mojo
• Event Horizon at The Numbers
• Event Horizon at the Cinematic Intelligence Agency (thecia.com.au)
• Event Horizon at Planet Origo