Rewriting Event Horizon
Jan. 29th, 2005 11:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
talktoolooseWe just watched Event Horizon, a science-fiction horror movie recommended by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
untoward and others back when I was soliciting horror suggestions.
Looking up viewer reviews online yesterday, I came across a wildly divided audience who gave it either 1 star out of 5 or 5 stars out of 5. No middle ground. Interesting.
I liked the feel of movie despite the fact that elements of its design and, pacing and dialogue came from many previous movies, chiefly Alien, Aliens and various Star Trekkery and then, ultimately, Hellraiser. The actors were all fine and handled the bantering with witty intensity. Laurence Fishburne, Sam Neill, Kathleen Quinlan. Good stuff. I think they made much more of the characters tha what was on the page.
I liked the basic premise: the Event Horizon, the first faster-than-light drive which operates by opening "gateways" in time-space, vanishes and returns mysteriously seven years later with a dead crew who are seen screaming and murdering each other in their final video logs. Clearly this ship has gone somewhere humans shouldn't go.
The movie makes good use of geographical logistics, quickly trapping the crew on the ghost ship that they'd earlier decided not to go near. Then they are slowly being driven mad by ghosts from their past (reminiscent of Flatliners. Anyone remember that movie?).
So we have been given an intriguing set-up and it's being played out pretty well. Problem is, the payoff is moronic. Where did the Event Horizon go through it's gateway? To HELL! That's right, HELL!. And it's Clive Barker hell with impaled corpses and maggots and flayed flesh and it's all very silly, especially when Sam Neill gets some bad makeup scars on his face and starts talking really calmly and EVILLY as the living representative of the ship of evil.
I mean, they almost get it right a few times. He says the ship went to a universe of chaos. Cool, okay. But then fucks it up by saying it's a place of pure evil. What the fuck is pure evil? I mean, could it be worse than Celine Dion sacrificing one of her thousands of identical test-tube children nightly at the climax of her Vegas show? Oh, shit! I should have given a spoiler warning about that too in case you were going to see the show...
And here's a question that you're not supposed to ask. The Event Horizon is in two pieces -- command and living quarters in the front, engineering and the "core" in the back with a long corridor connecting them. We learn early in the movie that the corridor is rigged with explosive charges in case you ever need to separate the pieces and use the command module as an escape pod.
Huh? Why explosives? In the official instruction manual (kept in the glove compartment), it says you're supposed to run the length of the corridor arming these puppies (while a female voice intones "ten minutes to detonation") and then escape back to the command pod. Well why don't they just build it so you can push a button and separate them without using TNT? Surely, if self-preservation is your goal, setting off explosives beside your rescue vehicle seems, at best, a dodgy proposition.
So the moral of the story is, you need to have a good ending or you're just wasting my time, dudes. Hmm, science opening the door to hell -- it could work, but you need to have a defrocked priest among the crew who can drop out of his role of short-order cook and don the cassock one last time.
Anyway, I did come up with a very cool SF premise based on how I would do the story. Why would an alien intelligence want to make people face their worst fears? I think it would seek to stimulate the most intense feelings it could as a strategy to initiate communication. It looks into our heads and doesn't have the first clue about all that subtle shit like academics and drivers license registration and house-training dogs. That's too abstract and specific. But it does see some bright, red-hot areas and prods those first.
The humans are then forced to go through their worst nightmares but, if they can keep their rational minds going, they will come to recognize that there is organization behind what they are going through and take the next step to deepen the communication. Unless they all go mad and kill each other and themselves first.
Hmm. I like it.
untoward and others back when I was soliciting horror suggestions. Looking up viewer reviews online yesterday, I came across a wildly divided audience who gave it either 1 star out of 5 or 5 stars out of 5. No middle ground. Interesting.
I liked the feel of movie despite the fact that elements of its design and, pacing and dialogue came from many previous movies, chiefly Alien, Aliens and various Star Trekkery and then, ultimately, Hellraiser. The actors were all fine and handled the bantering with witty intensity. Laurence Fishburne, Sam Neill, Kathleen Quinlan. Good stuff. I think they made much more of the characters tha what was on the page.
I liked the basic premise: the Event Horizon, the first faster-than-light drive which operates by opening "gateways" in time-space, vanishes and returns mysteriously seven years later with a dead crew who are seen screaming and murdering each other in their final video logs. Clearly this ship has gone somewhere humans shouldn't go.
The movie makes good use of geographical logistics, quickly trapping the crew on the ghost ship that they'd earlier decided not to go near. Then they are slowly being driven mad by ghosts from their past (reminiscent of Flatliners. Anyone remember that movie?).
So we have been given an intriguing set-up and it's being played out pretty well. Problem is, the payoff is moronic. Where did the Event Horizon go through it's gateway? To HELL! That's right, HELL!. And it's Clive Barker hell with impaled corpses and maggots and flayed flesh and it's all very silly, especially when Sam Neill gets some bad makeup scars on his face and starts talking really calmly and EVILLY as the living representative of the ship of evil.
I mean, they almost get it right a few times. He says the ship went to a universe of chaos. Cool, okay. But then fucks it up by saying it's a place of pure evil. What the fuck is pure evil? I mean, could it be worse than Celine Dion sacrificing one of her thousands of identical test-tube children nightly at the climax of her Vegas show? Oh, shit! I should have given a spoiler warning about that too in case you were going to see the show...
And here's a question that you're not supposed to ask. The Event Horizon is in two pieces -- command and living quarters in the front, engineering and the "core" in the back with a long corridor connecting them. We learn early in the movie that the corridor is rigged with explosive charges in case you ever need to separate the pieces and use the command module as an escape pod.
Huh? Why explosives? In the official instruction manual (kept in the glove compartment), it says you're supposed to run the length of the corridor arming these puppies (while a female voice intones "ten minutes to detonation") and then escape back to the command pod. Well why don't they just build it so you can push a button and separate them without using TNT? Surely, if self-preservation is your goal, setting off explosives beside your rescue vehicle seems, at best, a dodgy proposition.
So the moral of the story is, you need to have a good ending or you're just wasting my time, dudes. Hmm, science opening the door to hell -- it could work, but you need to have a defrocked priest among the crew who can drop out of his role of short-order cook and don the cassock one last time.
Anyway, I did come up with a very cool SF premise based on how I would do the story. Why would an alien intelligence want to make people face their worst fears? I think it would seek to stimulate the most intense feelings it could as a strategy to initiate communication. It looks into our heads and doesn't have the first clue about all that subtle shit like academics and drivers license registration and house-training dogs. That's too abstract and specific. But it does see some bright, red-hot areas and prods those first.
The humans are then forced to go through their worst nightmares but, if they can keep their rational minds going, they will come to recognize that there is organization behind what they are going through and take the next step to deepen the communication. Unless they all go mad and kill each other and themselves first.
Hmm. I like it.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
yours is better
Date: 2005-01-30 05:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-30 06:47 am (UTC)But then I've never disliked anything that had a spaceship in it.
no subject
Date: 2005-01-30 04:51 pm (UTC)The Tarkovsky version, not the Clooney one.
It would give you alot to work with. Especially since films like "Event Horizon" basically ripped it off.
Mind you, I kinda liked "Event Horizon".
no subject
Date: 2005-01-31 10:53 pm (UTC)I kinda like EH, too. We had more discussions about it the next day at breakfast. I realize that it's just a Twilight Zone episode. They rattle around on the spaceship for 20 minutes and then the gateway opens and SATAN is there! Fade to black, end of story. 22 minutes.