Quick Review of Event Horizon

A few months ago I completed a game called Mouthwashing. It's an amazing game with a supreme narrative about things going from bad to worse. You are on a ship in space with a barebones crew transporting goods. The absolute irony and madness behind what you are carrying is in the title which only becomes funny when you realize that you're doomed. Your captain incapacitated, your "girlfriend" pregnant, and you at the helm of a doomed vessel. Somehow, someway, you have to fix this mess. This was one of the few games that made my mouth drop. The last game accomplish this was Soma, another fantastic game. But after reading the wiki about the game, I was interested to look at the source material. Mainly a couple of movies: Sunshine and Event Horizon. Sunshine was foreign to me but I had heard of Event Horizon. It's infamous or famous for being one of the last 90s horror scifi films. I'm honestly glad that I was playing a game while allowing occasional glances at the film as it played on my phone. Event Horizon is a mess of a film. The film follows a crew aboard a ship called Lewis and Clark who are hired to investigate the whereabouts of the cfrew of the Event Horizon. It opens in a faux parody of Alien with the crew awakening from hyper sleep to get their information from their partial infodump Dr. Weir. Immediately I was hit with the unused dialogue from the military from Aliens. The crew is snarky and sarcastic in the same vein as the marines from Aliens but without the charm that James Cameron brought to his own film. Instead we have a mismatch of crew members who seem cranky ater waking up from a long nap, irritated that they are on a mission which kills any interest I had in the film. Dr. Weir, played by a Sam Neill who looks like he's out of place in space, explains that the Event Horizon used a black hole machine to travel through time and space. Once the Lewis and Clark finds the Event Horizon, strange events happen to the crew. One of the crew is able to translate part of the last message that the Event Horizon left which includes Latin dialogue for no reason. When they inspect the warp drive or whatever that powers the ship, one of the crew memebers is pulled into a liquid ring that causes him to go catatonic. This is followed by Captain Miller asking Dr. Weir minutes of dialogue asking "what is going" on or "what's happening?" Dr. Weir in typical horror movie fashion has no idea what's going on despite the fact that he built the Event Horizon. There's this amazingly audatious bit of dialogue where Weir answers with "I don't know" to several questions. It feels like the movie isn't taking what's happening seriously and instructing the viewer to do the same.  Each of them is haunted by ghosts or events of their pasts which is supposed to add a layer of dread to the film but comes off as silly. After several moments of not knowing what's happening and a few distrustful looks shot towards Weir, the crew discovers that the Event Horizon traveled to a hellish dimension where they underwent mutilation and torture by unknown assailants (including a ridiculous scene where one member presents his torn out eyes to the camera) and were killed. The crew of the Lewis and Clark prepare to leave with Weir cryptically stating that he wishes to stay on the ship in a corny manner. The events culminate with several of the crew dying in a row and Weir trapping captain Miller in the blackhole room. He explains that the ship has gone farther than his expectations and has come to life. It needs a crew and now it will take the Lewis and Clark's crew. Miller manages to kill Weir and himself and save the few survivors. 

Honestly, this was a waste of time. It feels like a popcorn movie that I'm not sure if I'm supposed to laugh with or chide. Over blown and abbrasive dialogue cuts any connection that a viewer might have had with the film and cements this movie into the unintentionally funny category. Boring jump scares are scattered throughout the film's beats but offer no satisfactory explanation as to what is happening on the Event Horizon. It feels as if the director was told to mash Aliens with Hellraiser which is offers a distrubing outcome for all the wrong reasons. Mix this with the unlikable and one dimensional characters and vague motivations and an overall attitude of "I don't want to be in this movie," and you'll understand why this movie did not make back it's budget. 

I was hoping for a more impactful film given that it inspired one of my favorite games of the past year. Instead it seems that it laid the groundwork of what not to do in a story rather than inspired it. I'll check out Sunshine next.