This is your classic ghost-ship story. The one where a “ship” disappears with all hands lost and them suddenley reapears several years later. The main twist with this one is that it has moved from the usual high-seas to outer-space, still within our solor system so it feels local in it location.
The main players in the story are the crew of the lewis+clarke, a season search and rescue squad. They have just completed their previous mission and are now due some well earned r+r when suddenly the “EVENT HORIZON” returns and for some reason they are the only search and rescue ship available. (Personally I would have thought there would have been alot more of these ships available). So from the start the crew are not happy about this mission, added to the crew is “Dr Weir” who we find out designed the EVENT HORIZON. They are put into grav-couches for the journey and off we go.
Dr Weir emerges from the grav-couch before anyone else, he is curious and wanders around the lewis+clarke to see if anyone else is awake. As usual thing suddenly open and the tension starts to build until eventually he sees he ex-wife who tell him she is waiting for him. Next we see him back in the grav-couch as he awakes properly after this nightmare / vision.
As the crew assembly in the mess hall, Dr Weir starts to brief them on the nature of their mission, and then tells them the name of the ship they are looking for. This puts the rescue crew into a frenzy, with the majority of them verbally informing the Dr that he is both wrong and full of shit. It seems that when the EVENT HORIZON was launched seven years earlier and then disappeared on its maiden voyage, the press release at the time said that “a reactor had malfunction, destroying the ship with al hand lost”, what it did not say was that the ship had an experimental gravity drive and this had been blamed for the accident. Dr Weir continues to explain how the gravity drive can fold space so vast distances can be covered relatively quickly, instead of taking 1000’s of years to get somewhere the EVENT HORIZON could get there in days.
Since the ship re-appeared all attempts at communication have failed, except for one sound byte that was detected which appears at first hearing to be a garble mess of mad sounds and noises. However one of the crew of the lewis-clarke recognises a latin phrase after it is cleaned up and translates it. Unfortunately we later discover that he gets it slightly wrong.
A Bording party is assembled and enter the EVENT-HORIZON, and the fun begin’s, or should i say Terror begins. The EVENT-HORIZON comes alive and slowly picks off each of the crew one by one, initially by itself causing ‘accidents’ for crew memebrs, but eventually with the help of Dr. Weir. I wont tell you how they die, that would spoil the film.
I remember back in 90’s when the film was released it was the 1st movie to have full CGI clouds and to be fair they have held up really well, were as some of the other CGI of objects floating in the zero gravity have not held up that well. Thankfully the rest of the film employs practical effects and they are excellently executed. The film starts slowly but when the deaths start,the pace picks up and is carried along nicely.
