“Hell is only a word. The reality is much, much worse.” Dr. Weir summarises the whole ninety-six-minute film solely with this statement.
In today’s video, we get a space-wrap movie with a hell dimension thrown in for good measure. Event Horizon, directed by Paul Anderson and starring Sam Neill, Joely Richardson, Laurence Fishburne, Kathleen Quinlan, and others, was released in 1997 and managed to steal our breath away.
In the year 2040, the deep space research vessel ‘EVENT HORIZON’ is sent to study the solar system’s frontiers, but it vanishes without leaving any trace beyond NEPTUNE. After 7 years, another spacecraft named LEWIS & CLARK is dispatched to circle Neptune, only to discover the half-dead event horizon that has been emitting radio transmissions through the planet’s declining orbit. Before setting roots on their mission, they ought to stop off at the low-earth-orbit ‘DAYLIGHT STATION’ to add one more crew member, Dr. Weir who designed and built the event horizon.
After recovering from stasis, Dr weir is introduced among the crew of the ship for a briefing during which all of them are informed that the event horizon was a research mission whose only target was to establish a vessel which can “fold space, so that point A and point B co-exist in the same space and time” hence creating a gravity drive, which means that the ship could travel anywhere around the whole universe faster than the speed of light.
As for now, their only perspective is to save the crew of the horizon and find out what happened to the ship through all these seven years. In short, if you have seen “GHOST SHIP” you can say that this movie is the aeronautical/space version of it. An overt ‘abstract’ Alien rip-off with certain plot holes makes it a ramp and slide sail.
The story begins with an enormous helicopter-shaped floating spacecraft (that’s our protagonist or rather we should say villain, as pictured in this movie) lost somewhere in space with its interior levitating with numerous objects, until we see a drifting body at the gates. Before we are able to grasp this whole situation, we meet a mild grey-headed man, approximately in his early 50’s, gently caressing a picture of a woman of the same age. As the story unfolds, we discover this man to be Dr. Weir (Sam Neill).
Just before he wakes from his stasis duration of 56 days, he had a lousy dream which he later suspects to be a vision of his dead wife. The moment he sees his wife’s face, which turns out to be a horrendous scene, he storms off from his capsule. He seems to be distorted and quite unstable in his present condition which is later confirmed by a short conversation between him and cooper (Richard T. Jones), the rescue technician.
Meanwhile, we see Peters (Kathleen Quinlan) the medical technician wanting to be present for her children but instead, now she was left with the option to see them only in the summer. Smith (Sean Pertwee) the pilot barges in announcing that they will be arriving in the orbit of Neptune in approximately 2 hours and 23 minutes.
Lt. Starck (Joely Richardson) gives them the green flag. As all are introduced to Dr. Weir by the skipper of the ship, Captain Miller (Laurence Fishburne), once the briefing is set to start Miller soon establishes that for his crew this is next to a doomed journey. As Weir discloses about the “CODE BLACK” as quoted by NSA, he states that “U.S.A.C. Intercepted a radio transmission from a decaying orbit around Neptune and the source has been identified as Event Horizon.”
In reality “the Event Horizon was the culmination of a secret government project to create a spacecraft capable of faster-than-light flight.” He further explains to all of them in what he stated as ‘Layman’s Terms’ which in reality consisted of very heavy-packed scientific physics phrases and notions.
At last, he made them practically understand that the ship creates a dimensional gateway which is known as ‘Gravity Drive’ which snaps you to the most unfathomable points all over, anywhere in the universe, and that he built it as they all are here to find out what just happened to the ship in those 7 years of disappearance.
As they study and listen to that single transmission received by TDRS, they manage to isolate it to a human voice with Latin gibberish slang. D.J. (Jason Isaacs) tries to unravel the message beneath it which sounds like ‘Liberate Me’. As they are headed towards the horizon the ship experiences heavy turbulence. When the distance between the two ships closes, their eyes go wide as they finally encounter the Event Horizon.
Lewis & Clark seemed to be a grass blade in the vicinity of the ship. Sensors picked up signs of life all over the ship but the life-form remains undiscovered or unknown at that moment and they are unable to locate the traces. Captain Miller decides to enter the ship and track them down and orders Dr. Weir to guide them from the com station, leaving him annoyed. On entering the central corridor Miller observes several square-shaped boxes which read ‘explosive device’.
He enters the medical bay and confirms the non-existence of any life form by saying “THIS PLACE IS A TOMB.” Justin the engineer (Jack Noseworthy) is puzzled by the orientation and design of the first containment zone and the whole path resembles a meat grinder to him. On the other hand, Peters steps inside the bridge and spots some blood marks.
As she moves ahead, a thunder light strikes behind her revealing the skull web and blood mast on its ceilings and neck. Now shit, sorry SHIP starts getting real! While on the bridge as Peters moves towards the ship’s log, she confronts a massive abrasive body covered in cracks of blood and flesh with dark empty eye-sockets, referring to it as a ‘Corpse-sicle’.
As Justin stands up to the huge spherical structure spinning among the compasses of three magnetic rings, his signal breaks down and tries invading his hand gradually inside its vicinity and, in a strike, he’s engulfed by the gravity drive. Within a second a blast occurs resulting in the hull’s breach on Lewis & Clark.
Cooper now turns to rescue Justin. Smith realizes they won’t be able to make it for long until Weir screams about the vitals on Event Horizon. After gaining control of the ship, Starck establishes the degraded CO2 scrubbers and what can set them free. Smith sets himself to examine Lewis & Clark’s situation.
As Miller faces the blood and skull-covered ceilings of the bridge, he questions Dr. Weir but he’s unable to answer it or it seems more likely that he’s trying to escape Miller’s question. Justin seems to be in a coma after the incident with the gravity drive. As Cooper tries to explain what he saw inside the drive, Weir stamps him with some incomprehensible statement and suggests that he’s being delusional.
Weir, while facing the gateway with Miller and Starck, elaborates that “when the three magnetic rings align, it creates an artificial black hole which allows the ship to travel to any point in space”. While Peters goes through the ship’s log in the medical bay, she experiences some creepy noise rising from an examination table covered in a tent, as she approaches the table, she comes across something horrifying until D.J. shakes her from behind leaving her to find that it was a mere delusional moment. As the crew gathers in the bridge the alarm blares outside, Miller and Weir rush to the gateway finding that there’s a displacement in the magnetic fields.
As D.J. arrives with some medical necessities, his attention is drawn by Justin’s shivering body and the eerie statement pulled by him “THE DARK IS COMING”. As weir enters the magnetic chamber to repair the damaged equipment the space soon turns into a dark cage till the moment, he sees her dead wife appearing for a nano-second and then fading out within a flash leaving him behind with her whispering “FOREVER”!
It appears that this ship is playing with the crew’s past fears, striking them with non-stop flashbacks like when a piece of land is hit by consecutive thunderbolts on an unbelievable stormy night, wondering what will be left of them to conserve. Outside the chambers, in the gravity drive zone Captain is devastated by the flaming figure appearing from the liquid pool. It sounds creepy but this liquid mercury is turning out to be the ‘WATERS OF DEATH’!!
In the bridge as all of them unite, there’s only one sentiment bursting through their minds, ‘F*** THIS SHIT, ERR, SHIP!!’ Meanwhile, while Miller marches on inspecting Lewis & Clark, he is stopped by Starck who tries to verbalize her only theory which she believes to be the truth that “THIS SHIP IS ALIVE!”
Back in the medical bay, as Peters tries to balance the thoughts whirlpooling in her mind, she notices that Justin’s table is empty. She covers the entire hall just when she finds herself losing again in the hallucinating time shift. Peters finds her way to the bridge where after a moment the walls and the outdoors of the bridge hall start thumping vigorously.
With Weir on his usual uncanny behavior, the forward airlock blares up, indicating someone’s presence in it. As Starck, D.J., Peters speeds up to the airlock, they find Justin on the other side while the door closes up into their faces and for more, he has engaged the overdrive! The young engineer’s mind has been rusted away, by the Horizon’s very own possessor, the DARK!
As Justin turns to face the three of them on the other side, Peters tries to talk him down until he presses the outdoor button the result of which he would be thrown in outer space till death engulfs him. As the 30 seconds start to deplete, his body begins experiencing the gut-wrenching state of proper and utter destruction. As soon as he is seen floating outside, Miller catches him on the entrance making his way to save him.
Now it’s bold, mighty Miller’s turn to be deflected by his very own fears which he kept hiding from every single being in the world until he landed on this Lovecraftian spaceship. As Captain let it all out with D.J. he is confronted by the man himself that he made an error during the translation of the radio transmission, which reads “LIBERATE TUTUME, EX INFERIS” – “SAVE YOURSELF FROM HELL”.
Whoa!! Would they be able to escape from this hellish rampage? It doesn’t look any easier with Dr. Weir turning out to be a WEIRDO as time progresses. With Cooper turning to be the bearer of good news, they are ready to repressurize the Clark and leave this rotting hell behind until Starck and Peters catch something barbarically disturbing on the ship logs, so bestial that they decide to leave this home of the dead immediately.
All crew members prepare to abort the ship. Peters alongside Smith gathers the CO2 scrubbers. After obtaining the last one, they both head towards the exit of the gravity drive until the words of Weir come true- “YOU CAN’T LEAVE. SHE WON’T LET YOU!” Peters is deflected by the appearance of her son behind the entranceway of the drive.
She follows the delusional figure until it makes her crash down at the foot of ‘Waters of Death’. As Weir enters the scene his eyes fall on Peters lying dead and her eyeballs turning pure black. He tries to follow the familiar sound, the one he heard inside the magnetic chamber and ends up in his own home with his wife, Claire.
While he shares some moments of truth the womanly figure consoles him until it pokes him to death. Back on the Clark, the ship is only seconds away from blowing up with Smith on it, tossing Cooper far beyond Neptune’s orbit. Weir slaughters D.J. Captain Miller after absorbing the view, and strides along to execute Dr. Weir.
On his way, the skipper finds an unconscious Starck. As both of them try to escape that arena, the flashlight strikes and they see Weir seated in the middle of the bridge with his eyeballs being scooped out. It appears that Cooper almost made it back to the hell horizon until he is shot again to just float in outer space.
With Weir finally meeting his end, Captain and Starck manage to survive and are reunited with Cooper in the forward airlock only to find out that Dr. Weir activated the gravity drive and the only way to shut it down is to blow the corridor and use the foredecks as a lifeboat. The main corridor is armed with Miller being disturbed by his past bearings; he swings along the closing gateway doors to save himself. He is errored by the false presence of the flaming figure but to sober out the complexity, the body transformed from its original figure to that of Weir, just to be left in awe.
The distorted figure makes him realize what happens beyond the gravity drive, in the hell horizon, the brutal massacre, the blood spills, the tormenting of flesh and bones, the eyes bleaching, and the worse of the worst that dimension can accommodate, which doesn’t exist in the universe we rely on living. Miller puts an end to this agonizing plague by hitting the detonator, splitting the horizon in half. The gravity drive containing moiety is seen dissolving in a whirlpool of what seems to be a black hole.
In the epilogue, it is established that after 72 days under the stasis Starck comes to life after dwelling in a horrific virtual reality and is seen suffering from PTSD. She and Cooper are saved by a rescue unit. As the film ends, we are left with no information on Miller and Weir’s tragedy. What happened to Justin’s case?
What would Cooper and Starck explain to the NSA or USAC? Was there any other alternative through which the captain could make its course back to the earth, with the hell being diminished from that part of the ship? What if the path they are spinning into would lead them to a whole new world of innocent and unknown possibilities or what if it was draining into a much enormous space of monsters and abstract hell? It all comes and clutters to WHAT IF?
EXPOSING THE ‘HORIZON OF HELL’
The creepy atmospheric lens through which this whole movie is viewed makes it too strong to be able to digest it through both our eyes and brain. The starting of the movie can be difficult to follow but as it crawls towards its tail it proves to be an exceptional fit in the genre of sci-fi-horrors. *It is believed that the spaceship was built on a cruciform and it was based on their design concept which the team specifically called ‘TECHNO-MEDIEVAL’.
Also, the second containment corridor was typically known to be “the room of evil” as the bulk of the horrifying acts happened there which made us nearly faint*. Laying the basis for various high-definition games and movies, this flick truly marked its entire course. The approach of bringing the experience of hell into existence made it survive instead of its tanked rundown and performance.
EVENT HORIZON: A PREQUEL TO WARHAMMER 40k UNIVERSE
Warhammer 40,000 is a miniature wargame, ranging from its first rulebook in September 1987 to the current ninth edition in July 2020. This game is set approximately in the 41st millennium where mankind generated a ‘Warp-Drive’ technology to fathom the world beyond stars and they become quite successful. This proves to be a common trait between the two entirely vast genres, linking both of them. In event horizon, the first gravity drive was built and set to launch to test its course and liabilities, mainly to cover the vast entities of stars and develop the space-time continuum.
Warhammer’s Warp is an alternate dimension where exists psych/chaos gods, the daemon servants with an awful lot of other capitals. The human entities dwelling on the Warhammer has special psychic navigators which guard them through the warp and an alternate technology known as Gellar Field. If they are not under the influence of Gellar Field, the crew would be exposed to the attacks by chaos gods/beings.
In the 1997 event horizon, it was confirmed that the ship was enveloped by a hell dimension that caused the slaughter of the crew inside it. It looked like the horizon was possessed and it ought to spread its possession through everyone who appears on its body and then swallows it by the means of gravity drive.
The drive comes alive when all three of its magnetic rings align and a huge amount of white bright light comes into existence. The ship disappeared through its voyage and was discovered through a transmission after 7 years. It was these 7 septic years that caused the horizon to contain a source of hell dimension.
The year when event horizon came into existence, both psychic navigators and the Gellar Field were not established. Eventually, in its absence, the crew was exposed to Warp/Chaos. It would have been KHORNE, the chaos god who wiped out all the human possibilities from the ship making it go through haunting hell and taking the horizon into its power.
As the event horizon is rediscovered, we find its vitals are normal and it contains enough surviving power. When the Lewis & Clark rescue ship comes in contact with the horizon’s vicinity, the chaos god finds another crew for it to take it into its proximity, to raise its kingdom of hell.
FAR REALM: THE ‘DARK’ DIMENSION
Far Realm contains natives of Mind Flayers, Aboleths, Beholders, Carrion Crawlers, Kaori, and Uvuudaum. Their language is classified as ‘Deep Speech’, scripted in Espruar which was solely developed by the Moon Elves and was used to write the Eleven Language.
The Deep Speech language is spoken in the regions of High Imaskar and Underdark by the creatures termed as Aberrations, which were unnatural. These creatures resemble the NECRIANS (from EARTH PRIME) in many ways like the regenerative tentacles, bodily contortion, and many others. They come from a salvage planet that killed and ate their kind. The total number of known necrians sums up to be 48.
The realm creatures had weird anatomies, strange abilities, alien mindsets, or rather any of the combinations. The Far Realm comprises infinite thin, transparent layers. These layers were penetrated by rivers of milky white fluid that floated freely, also it was accompanied by the gelatinous worms. Vegetation includes tentacled forests with orange moss growing above the green sea. Gravity and time were not included in the Far Realm.
The only movement possible was through the passage between layers. The air of this area was compared to that of a liquid syrup. Their inhabitants resembled mammals and insectoids. Its simplest natives were the pseudo-natural creatures. The Far Realm had these major planes- The Prime Material Plane and the Inner Plane.
DID THE SHIP MAKE IT THROUGH THE FAR BEYOND DIMENSIONS?
Mind flayers or mind rulers were sadistic aberrations feared by sentient creatures due to their psionic capabilities. Psionics consumes their victim’s personalities by extracting their brains while they were still alive. With their psionic abilities, they would have changed the entire proximity of the ship.
Since monsters with psychic powers can mold the very reason of their existence. They were considered masterminds that twisted others into serving their sinister schemes. They sought nothing less than world domination, they knew their destiny was mastery over the universe.
With these huge, powerful, and resourceful creatures along its way the ship may or may not have been able to skip these dimensions. It could also be possible that the ship was stuck into an unknown vicinity for light years and when the gateway was re-activated, it jumped into a more power concentrated field snapping it into a different space-time continuum.
By seizing the minds of the bodies aboard, these psychic beasts tend to overlap the unknown universe zones with their anomalous powers which can lead to space invasion which can directly affect our planet in various ways. It doesn’t seem to be a very tough challenge for these brain-stormed demons to conquer any given territory in space.
THE UPCOMING EVENT HORIZON TV SERIES is set to feature soon on the small screen through the Amazon Prime OTT service. The original director’s cut was the 130-minute and it is believed the audience would never be able to experience that 130-minute space death movie accompanied by cosmic horror.
In August 2019 news broke that Amazon prime is adapting a TV series of the 1997 Event Horizon alongside Paramount Television and Adam Wingward as executive producer and director. It can be a remake of the film or a series follow-up, mining the various questions and possibilities that were etched in the back of the viewer’s mind.