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Overall Rating
  Awesome: 20.66%
Worth A Look: 35.54%
Average: 11.57%
Pretty Bad: 15.7%
Total Crap: 16.53%
4 reviews, 97 user ratings
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| Event Horizon |
by Ryan Arthur
"The director of Mortal Kombat brings you something even lamer."
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All style, no substance.It's too bad a movie would squander a cast with such potential and striking visuals. But this movie does it.
This movie tries to do something that just really isn't done anymore: it tries to scare you outright. Not scare you and make you laugh, like with Scream, or scare you in a psychological sense, like Silence of the Lambs. No, this is your basic fright movie, complete with music that starts off really soft and then BUILDS UP...and then stops completely when the shock is supposed to hit you. Don't get me wrong; I jumped a lot during the course of this movie, but I jump pretty easily, like at bank openings. It's not even that the film is that gory; most of the gore (the little that remains) is shown in quick flashes and jump cuts. There's buildup, but no payoff, in what we're supposed to see. Apparently there's no suspense in the future, either.
The plot itself is pretty insignificant. It's about a black hole where something bad happened, and not coincidentally, the script itself has several gaping black holes in it as well. Plot problems? Oh yes. Why is only half of the crew hallucinating? If nothing can move faster than the speed of light (as one crew member points out early on), why does it take only 56 days (that's right: DAYS) to get from Earth to Neptune? And why is the only other African-American crew member aside from Laurence Fishburne reduced to mere comic relief? There's no backstory to the characters, no insight into who they are, and we never really completely learn what happened to the "Event Horizon" (the ship, not the movie) in the seven years it's been missing, although we can assume that the ship, like the script, was lost in space).
Laurence Fishburne, Kathleen Quinlan, Sam Neill, Joely Richardson...al wasted. The script is hokey enough, but having them try to talk in sci-fi technobabble just takes it over the line.
The only saving grace of this film? Visuals. The sets (built in London's massive Pinewood Studios) are huge and incredibly intricate. The effects are impressive for the most part, although not scientifically sound (Jack Noseworthy floating out into space sans spacesuit. He should've burst like a grape in a microwave. We couldn't be so lucky.). But it's just not enough to save it.There's better bad sci-fi for you to waste your time on.
link directly to this review at https://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=391&reviewer=7
originally posted: 09/02/98 06:14:53
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USA
15-Aug-1997 (R)
DVD: 18-Apr-2006
UK
N/A
Australia
02-Feb-1997
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