Sam Neill and Laurence Fishburne in one film, directed by a Mr Anderson. That could be a good thing. Unfortunately it is the very worst conceivable Mr Anderson out of the available ones – the one with the unique ability to throw a lot of money at the audience, only to bore them senseless (see the recent Pompeii) … and it is not the best phase in the careers of Mr’s Neill and Fishburne where they get to meet him.
I am the first person to enjoy a bit of rubbish SciFi horror nonsense, my affection for the oeuvre of John Carpenter bears witness to this. “Event Horizon”, however, is like you remove the fun parts out of “Ghosts of Mars” (yes, there are some!) and add the bad parts from “The Abyss” (of which there are many) as well as any part from “Stargate” (which consists exclusively of not very good bits, IMHO).
You end up with a completely generic bit of “Our spaceship is on a rescue mission and it is going oh so wrong, damn you, genius but crazy scientist!”. It is a boring mess, and not in a good way. Even the best part, the cgi design of the space ship and neighbouring planets, is annoying, as its quality stands in such stark design to the characters and the plot. As if the aim had been to make a nice IMAX space documentary, and then some 47 Dollars were left over to throw in some recognisable but cheap actors.
Not a classic…
thomas4cinema 