It’s the year 2047 and the Lewis and Clark are sent to look for the
Event Horizon. The Event
Horizon disappeared in 2040 during its voyage to Proxima Centauri, which is
about 4.5 light years away from Earth.
Dr. William Weir is coming along for the ride because he designed and built
a new kind of gravity drive that’s on the Event
Horizon. The gravity drive looks
like a huge gyroscope, but what it does is to create artificial black holes
that allow spaceships to cover huge astronomical distances in short periods of
time. Think of it as a kind of “warp
drive” from Star Trek. After being missing for seven years, the Event Horizon sent a distress call. The Lewis
and Clark found the Event Horizon
orbiting Neptune. The search party
boards the Event Horizon to look for
survivors, but there are none to be found.
What they did find was evidence that many, if all, the crew had been
killed by something. While the search
party is on the ship, the gravity drive activates by itself. Hmmm…
After the gravity drive
activated, strange things began to happen.
One crew member found the gravity drive.
The gravity drive generated such a force it opened a portal to another
dimension, and when this particular crewmember found it, he [Justin] is sucked
in. He was brought back, but when he got
back he was in a state of shock.
Something he had seen on the “other side” made him catatonic. He’s brought back to the Lewis and Clark, but while on board he tried to commit
suicide. He tried to leave the spaceship
without a suit. His shipmates were able
to close the airlock and pressurize it before Justin exploded. Other crewmembers begin to have
hallucinations. Captain Miller
[Fishburne] has flashbacks of a abandoning a fellow astronaut in a fire. Dr. Weir sees his dead wife come back to
life, only there are no eyes in her eye sockets. Apparently she killed herself while Weir was
away on another space flight – she couldn’t bear the separation any
longer. This vision of his wife [whom he
misses terribly] urged him to join her wherever she is. The medical technician [Kathleen Quinlan]
sees her dead son. Such is the effect
the gravity drive is having on the Lewis
and Clark crew. The force generated
by the Event Horizon’s gravity drive
is also damaging the Lewis and Clark
to such an extent that the crew has to abandon the Lewis and Clark and use the Event
Horizon as a lifeboat.
After a while Lieutenant Starck
[Joely Richardson] is able to unscramble the Event Horizon’s video log.
It shows the Event Horizon’s
going insane and killing each other.
Having seen the log, Capt. Miller makes a snap decision – “we’re
leaving!” Capt. Miller figured out the Event Horizon was indeed able open a
gateway through space and that it crossed over into another dimension, one that
Dr. Weir called “a dimension of pure chaos, pure evil.” As all of this was happening, the Event Horizon turned into a sentient
being. Perhaps that’s how the gravity
drive activated itself at the beginning.
Capt. Miller wanted to destroy the Event
Horizon, but the ship was not only able to think for itself, it was also
telepathic. Dr. Weir didn’t want his
creation to be destroyed. The ship had
an iron grip on Weir’s mind – he went insane.
He gouged out his own eyeballs and sowed the sockets shut. He didn’t need eyes anymore – the ship did the
“seeing” for him. And, he wanted to go to that other dimension to be with his
wife. One by one, the crew begins to
die. Kathleen Quinlan’s character saw
another vision of her dead son. This
vision led her to the engineering section, where she died in a fall. Dr. Weir killed another crew by vivisecting
him [that was pretty gruesome]. We
didn’t see the act itself, just the result, which was horrible enough. Weir trapped Lt. Starck on the bridge, and
had by this time had activated the ship’s gravity drive again, only this time
with a ten-minute countdown to transport back to the other dimension. Weir shot out the window on the bridge, the
decompression of which sucked him into space.
Capt. Miller and Lt. Starck managed to seal off the bridge and survive.
Miller decided the only way out
is to blow the ship into two parts. The
part with the gravity drive would go back from whence it came, while the
forward section would be a lifeboat.
While he’s in the back of the ship, he’s attacked by manifestations of
the man he abandoned in the fire years ago [an astronaut named Corrick], and of
the recently-departed Dr. Weir. Weir
shows Miller what he can expect when he gets to the other side – visions of his
crew suffering the same fate [and in the same way] as that of the Event Horizon. He fights off the manifestations of Corrick
and Weir and sets off the explosives.
His plan worked - the Event Horizon went back to the other
dimension [presumably Hell], while Lt. Starck and two other astronauts escaped
to safety on the “lifeboat.” When they
were rescued, Lt. Starck was awakened from her deep sleep, only to see a vision
of the eyeless Dr. Weir as one of her rescuers.
She starts to scream uncontrollably – the door closes…
Event Horizon didn’t do so well at the box office, but thanks to
Encore it’s a cult classic in the Howard house.
It’s just a little over 90 minutes, and it doesn’t drag. The visions of the eyeless Dr. Weir are too
creepy for words. They’re what I call
“Whoa! moments” – those things that are so unexpected, so intense they just
blow your mind when they happen. Event Horizon has enough “Whoa! moments”
to keep it interesting, which is what every good horror movie needs.
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