1. Remember when this movie was awesome? Me too! Saw this when it came out and there were high fives all around. Alas, some movies should just stay in your brain as a nostalgia.
3. Remember how awesome the beginning of Blade was? I know! Very cool. Yet! Last time I watched Blade all I could think about in that first scene was a) if you lived forever, wouldn't you eventually get sick of techno and b) look at that freaking leather beret that guy is wearing, Blade should let him die. What does that have to do with Event Horizon? This! Don't rewatch movies you liked in the '90s. For God's sake, never watch The Crow again. You will start recalculating your entire life.
4. I will say that Plaza puts on a good show and I met the GM, a guy named John who is a real 35mm nut, the Plaza being one of the few remaining 35mm Projector theaters left in the area. So I have found a good home for the boxes and boxes of 35mm trailers I pilfered from Riverdale Cinemas during my 5 year tenure as a projectionist BACK IN DA DAY!
5. The print for this movie was immaculate It looked like a brand new strike, not something they found in someone's basement. So I like to talk about how much I love the new digital projectors. Nevermind all that. 35mm is better. So much better. A pristine 35 beats in the face of digital. Movies are dead. I'm not a snob, but movies are over. In between reels there was a contrast change and a emulsion difference making the next reel more saturated and darker, and in that moment I realized how much I missed that, and then wept silent bitter tears that all that will be gone in another year or so. I know, go to bed old man.
6. So Alien, Aliens, Alien 3, Black Hole, The Shining, and Hellraiser were tossed onto a butcher's block and hacked into bloody meaty chunks, and then shuffled and randomly reassembled into a Frankenmovie. That is Event Horizon. I can't hate it. What we have here is a big giant multi-million dollar fan film. It is wet with fanboy drool. Soaked. I know geek people hate on P.W.S. Anderson. But I "get him". He is a big kid, playing with the best toys, and making movies that are so high on geeking out all over themselves that being a good movie is an after thought. You got to be 14 years old while watching his movies, gorged out on comics and video games and sugar and horror movies. He is exactly the filmmaker we would have been at that age. He is living it. And he gets to wake up next to Mia Jovovich. Hate may be too light of a word.
7. I will say this, the production design and art direction of the Event Horizon ship is the star of the movie. Everything is dwarfed by that ship, no matter how loudly it tries to scream over it.
8. Every element is trying to scream over the other. The movie gets louder and bigger and wackier minute by minute. Every scene is trying so hard, throwing every trick in the book to make it dramatic and suspenseful But instead of suspense it becomes like a Schumacher Batman movie. Instead of atmosphere and dramatic weight we end up with disco on a pogo stick. If you can't be good, be loud.
9. Sparks + Fire + Everyone yelling + shaking the camera = awesome
10. Kathleen Quinlan acts circles around everyone in this. She is the only one that is a real person having a real experience. Everyone else is in comic book mode or on William Shatner overdrive.
SHOWSTOPPER - Fishburne's ridiculous big boy chair.
SHOWSTOPPER 2 - Neal's line, "Hell is but a word, the reality is much worse".
SHOWSTOPPER 3 - I need one of those spacesuits.
PAIR WELL WITH - Black Hole '79. Because that movie is awesome.
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