Hi! I wonder if anyone saw _Event Horizon_, it just came to Oklahoma.
The reason I decided to watch it was the awesome computer graphics I had
seen on TV commercials, plus my love of science fiction. The visual effects
turned out to be even better on big screen. Which was all that was good
about the movie.
The film is a great collection of stereotypes, gender and otherwise,
presented through combination of plotlines, borrowed from
other movies and TV shows. It's story is about a rescue team sent to a
long lost spaceship that had reappeared after seven years. The team includes
eight members, two of which are women, representing traditional female
roles of a Mother, and a Sex Object. About the former,you can say right away
that she'll be among the first to get killed, since she's old and not too
attractive (the same as in older movies, the black guy would be the first
to go). The other woman, a tall skinny blonde, survives through the end
of the movie, probably because she rarely does anything but helplessly
struggling with some electronic systems or being continuously rescued
from some danger by one of the male crew members.
The ship they are heading to, Event Horizon, was built to reach some
unindetified location in another galaxy, by employing an artificially
created black hole for faster-than-light-speed travel. Instead, it
disappeared for seven years, and then showed up around Neptune, sending
a weird message in Latin (which, by the way, none of Earth scientist were
able to decipher, but the geek member of the rescue team translated right
away). Since all the E.H. crew members seem to be dead, there is a
question why aliens would communicate in Latin. However, as it turns
out, the whole deal has nothing to do with aliens.
The scientist who had designed the unfortunate ship (and later explains
its principle of operation by poking holes in a porn magazine), is also
present in the mission. He is haunted by a zombie-like image of his wife
who keeps appearing first in his nightmares, and later physically, as a ghost
(together with a bunch of other characters from crew members' dark past,
which looked like direct plagiarism from Lem's _Solaris_). At first, one
would guess that she was one of the vanished members of E.H. crew, whose
remains are still either smeared about the ship's walls or floating
around in pieces due to zero gravity. It would explain his desire to
participate in the rescue mission, but that is not the case. In reality, she
had killed herself many years ago, and therefore (guess what?) went to Hell.
So the guy used the government-sponsored program of space exploration to
build a ship that could reach "another dimension, dimension of pure evil",
that is, Hell itself. So that he could use it to reunite with his wife. It is
not clear, though, why he did not do it right away, instead of sending the
original crew and most of the rescue one to their death (apart from the
reason to let us watch them clawing out their eyes, which was the most
recurring theme).
By the middle of the movie, there is no more doubt that this is not science
fiction, but horror, and not a very good one. Too much is too much, and
at some point the endless images of screaming, bleeding all over guys,
(looking just like the visions in _Millenium_) seem too fake to be scary.
When, at the end, the already-dead evil scientist gets re-created by the
ship, the Hellriser-like brownish cuts on his face look about as
realistic as cheap plastic "scars" from a Halloween store.
In other words, this movie sucks. The only good parts of it are special
effects. The bottles, tools, watches, and other loose junk, slowly
spinning and bouncing in the dark gloomy vacuum inside the ship,
together with giant brown bubbles of liquid, jiggling, colliding, and
breaking apart among them, it looked absolutely gorgeous. If that could be
separated and viewed by itself, I would buy it on video. The other
good thing was the sound, it can scare the Hell out of you even
without looking at the screen. I think, the sound might get an Oscar next
year.
Of course, all this is just my opinion. I would love to know somebody
else's. Thanks.
Marina
"Femininity is code for femaleness plus whatever society
happens to be selling at the time."
Naomi Wolf
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu May 25 2000 - 19:06:35 PDT