We kind of did; he flashed back to the crewman he left to burn several times, and had to confront his manifestation in the end.
I liked it, too.
The premise is intriguing, the film is creepy and reasonably well-done. It’s not a great movie by far, not even a great horror movie, but I’ve always thought that the hate it gets was way over the top.
Overall, I like Event Horizon well enough, but I agree with everyone who says that the first half was building up so nicely and the second half was a major let-down.
The movie Sunshine had a very similar failing, in my mind:
After a long, moody and very interesting build-up, it turns out that the first ship failed because someone went crazy. Then the writers came up with this half-assed excuse to make the crazy guy look like Freddy Krueger and the characters chased him all over the ships until they killed him.
To make it better for me, they just need to be consistent. If your movie is smart and sciency at the beginning, it needs to end smart and sciency. If it’s just monster-of-the-week on a spaceship, then it ought to start that way. Don’t spend an hour building up your premise when the premise is just a flimsy way to introduce demons from hell or crazy psychos.
Pretty much nails it. There are other movies that have this same problem deciding what they want to be, and tend to disappoint audiences because the marketing campaign chooses one aspect or another to promote it. Other than comedies, movies that take a right-angle turn from their starting premises are failures.
One of my favorites in that respect is* Death Becomes Her*, which is a straightforward creepy/weepy love triangle for almost half the film. Then comes that right-angle turn…
I think the movie would have been 1,000 times better if they’d had a couple of sarcastic robots in the lower corner making wisecracks.
I would make the second half similar in tone to Michael Mann’s weird but vastly underrated The Keep: the ship hasn’t just been to hell and back, it’s brought a demon as passenger. He want to get to Earth, and he’s not just slashing people at random, he’s willing to cut deals to get where he wants. Want to be human, little ship’s android ? Sure ya do, all you robot crew-members want to be human. I got a soul for ya right here, and all ya gotta do is plot me a course… Want back the wife who died in an accident you blame yourself for, captain? I got her right here, and all I need is for you to punch in some co-ordinates…
When I saw this in the theater when it came out, I didn’t like it very much. I watched it again on DVD a couple of years ago and liked it more, at least for the first two-thirds. I thought it sort of fell apart for the last third.
Apparently, the original cut of the movie was 130 minutes long and it would be interesting to see if that had better pacing. Supposedly a copy of this version was discovered by one of the producers on a VHS tape a few years ago, but I don’t know if anything has been done about making it available.
Also worth pointing out, it’s widely accepted fanon that Event Horizon is set in the Warhammer 40k universe, and the Event Horizon is mankinds first exposure to the Warp.
The original cut was rated NC-17, as it contained graphic footage from the original crew’s frenzied, sado-masochistic orgy. There’s more about it here.
That’s one thing I never figured out with regards to the plot. Apparently the original crew went crazy instantly, while the crew of the Louis and Clark were slowly haunted and consumed by their past personal failings. Why the difference?
WAG: The original Event Horizon crew actually went to hell and back. The L&C crew only had to deal with the psychic taint still clinging to the ship?
Agreed, though I thought the scene at the beginning where Ripley is shown a photo of her daughter who has lived a full life and died while Ripley was asleep in hyperspace was moving and thought-provoking, it also helped explain why she went to such great lengths to save Newt. But like the other extended scenes it does unfortunately badly screw up the pacing of the movie.
That could be interesting definitely but the original already had a scientist who behaved pretty much that way, Sam Neill’s character spends most of the movie trying to come up with plausible scientific explanations for the weird phenomena that is occuring, and actually its only when he’s confronted by the Captain and is forced to admit that he can’t explain it that he finally goes completely off the deep end.
As OneCentStamp says the original crew actually activated the gravity drive and went through the Gate, the crew of the Lewis and Clark are only being affected by whatever the ship brought back with it, the gravity drive is activated again at the very end and the rear of the ship disappears with it, but as I said above my theory is that the front of the ship is still possessed which is why we get that creepy ending. 
I thought Sam Neill’s character went off the deep end when he’s confronted by the vision of his wife committing suicide. He started to crack when the Captain told him they were going to destroy the ship. But then he sees one of the dead crew by the gravity drive and rushes to help her. So he was behaving irrationally due to his concern for the ship, but he still had general human decency. Right after that, the ship shows him his wife’s suicide and he loses it completely.
As for the ending, I always interpreted it as either residual possession on that half of the ship, or just psychological trauma on the part of the lieutenant. The door closing on them was quite ominous, though.
Event Horizon definitely had its flaws, but I think it paid off on its potential better than Sunshine did. Partially because dealing with horrors on a haunted ship was set up pretty early in the former. In the latter, they made a lot of effort with the science and underscoring that the challenge was going to be completing the mission with a badly damaged ship. Then the crazy crewman comes out of nowhere and suddenly it’s a bargain basement slasher movie. All that potential was completely wasted, so it felt like much more of a letdown.
Yeah, in retrospect I think you’re right, he was quite an interesting character actually.
I think the problem with the psychological trauma explanation though is that she sees Sam Neill’s character all scarred and marked as he was at the end although she never saw him in that form before. There is a deleted scene which implies she did actually see him all scarred up but the ending does work better when its a bit more ambiguous.
100% agreed, Event Horizon’s entire premise was built on a supernatural element, Sunshine wasn’t and it went completely bizarre towards the end, it would have better if they’d just played it straight.
Now there i must strongly disagree, “She has to save Newt, because she’s a surrogate for the daughter she lost, GET IT moviewatchers?” It’s pure Hollywood lazy scriptwriting. They help Newt, because of course they would, they’re trying to do the right thing. Your mileage may vary of course.
I have to agree the pacing with the extended version is all over the place.
“Normally I wouldn’t give a shit about a little girl getting raped to death by space penises, but, well, turns out I once had a daughter who died. So I guess I’ll save you, but this is totally out of character for me, just so you know.”
They already remade Event Horizon for every vaguely horrorish video game that takes place in space. Especially Dead Space and Doom.
The point is Ripley doesn’t just help her because it’s the right thing or it’s part of her job description or whatever. She has maternal instincts, which gives a little more depth to her character besides being a hardass. It also explains her suicidal rescue attempt where most others would be like yeah, she’s fucked, or comforting Newt for bedtime.
Doom predates Event Horizon by a good few years. They even included some sound effects from the game in the movie as a little homage to it.
In all fairness, that makes every movie a thousand times better.
Yeah, I definitely agree with that. As disappointing as I found Event Horizon, there are so many movies that do it worse.
Here’s my theory:
(for the record, I saw Event Horizon in the theaters when it first came out, and was totally underwhelmed by it. I hadn’t given it a second thought until I read this thread. Then I went and watched it - twice! - on Netflix Streaming in the last two days. Yes, I’m dedicated.)
The movie does not work for me, because it is an incompatible blend of genres. Genres exist for a reason: they work! Horror movies put us in a familiar place (High school prom, camping with our buddies, baby-sitting for the neighbors, visiting a creepy house down the block, etc…) and then BAM! put some evil into the mix. We feel the effect of the evil because we can identify with the normalcy of the situation the characters find themselves in, and the evil gets to us.
Science Fiction movies, on the other hand, work because they take us to an UNfamiliar place: we enjoy the unfamiliarity of the surroundings, the newness of the situation, and the escape from the mundane. We feel totally out of place, and we enjoy that.
Now, along comes Event Horizon. It attempts to blend the two genres. Unfortunately, they are not a good mix. The very unfamiliarity of the science fiction setting makes it much harder for us to identify with the characters and the horrors that they are about to experience. So that when the horrific occurrences occur, we don’t have the natural tendency to identify with them. Yes, they might be cinematically awesome, but we are not in a comfortable place, identifying with the characters, and feeling like they just might be happening to us. They are happening to people who are decidedly *not *us, and *not *in a position we can see ourselves in. Therefore, they leave us unmoved.
Anyway, I could be totally wrong about this, but that’s my theory about why science fiction horror doesn’t generally work.