I'd consider this the least awful of Paul "Wet Shits" Anderson's movies.

Ya, this is his best. His Death Race remake and Soldier are both also pretty watchable.

I think Alien is a great movie. In defense of the younger generation, though, you're almost always going to give a film more slack when you're watching it in a theater. You're completely focused on the screen, get to take in the great cinematography, have already invested X amount of time and money, etc. etc.

Altho I like Resident Evil, everything Anderson has done feels mushy and incomplete. Event Horizon comes close to feeling fully realized, but I really don't like the whole Hellraiser-on-the-Nostromo premise. I don't find it interesting or scary.

I resent this film so much. It should have been awesome, and it was bullshit.

Far from perfect, but I do enjoy this film.  Check out Pandorum to see how bad Paul W.S. (producer) sci-fi can be.  Actually, don't check it out.

Last edited by Josh (2012-10-15 20:18:41)

My memory of Event Horizon from watching it once in the cinema is that it seemed like eight-year-olds had written it, eight-year-olds who had just wet their pants repeatedly when watching Alien and Hellraiser and Evil Dead, eight-year-olds that would think pact with the Devil stories were original, eight-year-olds who threw every scary thing they'd ever seen in their short, excitable lives at a blanket, and found all of it sticking.

They'd be in their 20s now anyway, so it's actually be ok to buy them drinks

Great commentary guys. Interesting discussion about when the aesthetic changed from the future being shiny new & optimistic, to a run-down dystopian look. Somewhere in the mid-1970s was the demarcation line (Star Wars, Alien, Mad Max). Suddenly there was a pessimism - the oil price shocks and economic stagflation, Vietnam vets returning home,  the escalating threat of the Hydrogen bomb, DDT & the environmental movement, the end of the Apollo program, etc). The future wasn't looking so rosy.

Good call categorizing Event Horizon together with Friday 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street, rather than other sci-fi films of the period (e.g. Supernova, Sphere, Red Planet, Mission to Mars)
It'd be a shame if the genre of sci-fi (which is supposed to be about noble things like humanity's future) gets debased to monsters that go 'booo' or teen superheroes. Genuine sci-fi in the traditional sense is getting rarer.

Also, would it be fair to label this a Christian movie, in the sense that it's set in a Christian universe where Hell actually exists? Just like Indiana Jones 3, Legion, The Exorcist, and Ben Hur, are "Christian" movies, where supernatural phenomena from the Bible manifest themselves. Raiders of the Lost Ark wouldn't technically count as Christian as the Ark is from the Old Testament, so it's at least a Jewish movie.

If I'm remembering correctly this film was BUTCHERED by the MPAA. There original cut of the film is approximately 45 minutes longer, but due to the poor reception the film received the uncut version has never seen the light of day. I remember Fangoria did a fairly extensive run down of the missing material, I think in the long cut we saw much more of the original crew's journey into and back from hell.

That quick montage of gruesome cuts was significantly longer, possibly not even a montage.