“Now, I know you want a relic from the Event Horizon, you can feel it down in your soooouuuuul, you just have to have one! Brothers, sister, predators, it’ll make you one of us to have a bit of this famous ship of Christ in your living room! So here’s the first piece we have, and it’s … the … ship’s STEERING WHEEL! Imagine how the neighborhood will talk about you once you reveal this is in your living room, with the victims’ blood still on it! Who’ll start the bidding at $24.99?” They should have gotten Drew Carey to run the auction, instead.
Event Horizon (1997) is, I suppose, an infuriating story for science fiction fans. It gets off to a fine start, as spaceship Lewis & Clark gets underway to rescue a ship, Event Horizon, that’s been missing for seven years that’s suddenly popped up in orbit around Neptune. The science sounds good, rescue ship is suitably worn, rescue crew interactions are mostly believable, although the eccentricities seem a bit exaggerated, but the idea that the designer of the Event Horizon didn’t go with the ship – especially with his wife aboard – seems really odd.
Designer, you say? But yes; it’s revealed that Event Horizon is more than a whimsical name. The ship was designed to be the first interstellar exploration ship, and to do so, it creates a temporary, artificial black hole, and uses its event horizon to make the leap to its target star system.
All well and good. After all, a good star drive is one of the accepted exceptions to real physics allowed in science fiction.
But … it turns out the path opened by Event Horizon is the one to Hell. Just about literally. Yep, use your reverberating bass mind voice for that one. One by one, crew members experience terrible things in their heads, so frightening they become catatonic, and then one of them is taken over.
And let me say, Bah. My Arts Editor and I were involved in multiple incidents of eyeball-rolling, because an interesting story about rescuing explorers had become just another religio-jump-scare movie, with demons and evil and all that unexplained trash, including a space captain who happens to speak Latin at moments of supreme stress.
Might as well encounter Jason in Space. (“Jasons In Space”? Anyone care to describe what was in your mind when you read that?)
So this was off to a fine start, and abruptly jumped into the metaphorical La Brea Tarpits for an informal wrestle with a sabre-tooth tiger and the lead monster from Alien. Unrecommendable, really. And too bad.
