Miller: Laurence Fishburne
Weir: Sam Neill
Peters: Kathleen Quinlan
Starck: Joely Richardson
Cooper: Richard T. Jones
Justin: Jack Noseworthy
D.J.: Jason Isaacs
Smith: Sean Pertwee
Burning Man: Noah Huntley
2015
First permanent colony established on moon.
2032
Commericial mining begins on Mars.
2040
Deep space research vessel "Event Horizon"
launched to explore boundaries of
solar system.
She disappears without trace beyond the
eighth planet, Neptune.
It is the worst space disaster on record.
2047
Now...
Event Horizon
starts where the above prologue ends. A signal from the
aforementioned craft has been detected and the United States Aerospace Command
responds. Hurtling toward the signal's source are a fearless captain
(Laurence Fishburne), his elite crew and the lost ship's designer
(Sam Neill).
Their mission: find and salvage the state-of-the-art spacecraft. Before
reaching the ship, Sam Neill tells the crew of the rescue ship, Lewis & Clark,
about the Event Horizon's most important feature - a gravity drive, which
enables the ship to pass from one point of time and space to another
instantaneously by briefly joining these two points up for long enough to pass
through. Naturally this is met with scorn, but as events begin to turn the shape
of pear everything gets as bizarre as is possibly imaginable...and then some.
The film has been dubbed '"The Shining" in space', which gives you a fair
description of some of the problems the crew are due to face, although it
borrows elements from a number of films including that one, Alien,
Hellraiser, Poltergeist and many other sci-fi or supernatural thrillers.
There are, however, a few plot-holes and silly moments throughout the film,
such as the crew's periodical hallucinations all of which serve to create the
strange spectacle on display.
All of the cast are not the sort of people you'd normally associate with
sci-fi nonsense, but they do well to carry the material from start to finish
even if it isn't designed to make perfect sense.
The stand-out cast members are Sam Neill and to say his character has
a hidden agenda is an understatement; plus British actors Joely
Richardson - who provides what babe quotient there is - and Sean
Pertwee, who thinks everything can be carried out with a cocky attitude.
Also in the cast are Jason Isaacs who features in the summer 1998 hit
Armageddon as one of those boffins who knows 'everything about
everything' in a five-minute potted version of his role here, while TV soap
opera Emmerdale's Noah Huntley has a cameeo as "Burning Man" (!)
Sam Neill never learned *not* to hug the ship's angry cat.
The picture quality of the disc is excellent. Sharp detail and vivid colours
bring the special effects, be they models or CGI, to life and the anamorphic widescreen
framing of 2.35:1 replicates the original theatrical ratio. Quite how anyone
is able to make sense of such a weird film in fullscreen format is beyond
belief.
The average bitrate is a high and fairly steady 7.20Mb/s.
The sound is also perfect. Explosions aplenty, dramatic ambience, Michael
Kamen's score, plus The Prodigy's "Funky Shit" all blend together to provide
an aural assault on the senses. At first I didn't think that The Prodigy or
the fast-paced opening music fitted in well with the film, but then following
Shopping and Mortal Kombat, director Paul Anderson was
never known for his subtlety. Dolby Digital 5.1 is available in English and
German, while the Czechs and Hungarians are relegated to Dolby Surround only.
The disc needs more chapters with only 17 spread throughout the film itself,
the only extra is a 2-minute 16:9 anamorphic trailer, the menus are silent and static and
subtitles are available in 10 languages ;
English (and hard of hearing), Arabic, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, German,
Norwegian, Polish, Swedish and Turkish.
DVDs reviewed by the editor are watched on a Panasonic TXW32R4 32" widescreen TV
connected to either a Creative Dxr2 DVD-ROM player or Microsoft Xbox and
played through a Sony STR-DB930 amplifier.
PC games reviewed by the editor are on:
Since Nov 2005: Intel Pentium D 830 3.0Ghz, 1Gb RAM, 128Mb nVidia GeForce 6700XL, Windows XP
Since Aug 2003: Intel Pentium 4 2.66Ghz, 512Mb RAM, 128Mb GeForce4 MX440 graphics, Windows XP
Since May 2003: Intel Pentium 4 2.6Ghz, 512Mb RAM, 128Mb ATI Radeon 9600TX graphics, Windows XP
Since Jun 2002: Intel Pentium III 600Mhz, 384Mb RAM, Windows 98 SE, 64Mb ATI Radeon 8500LE
Since May 2000: Intel Pentium III 600Mhz, 384Mb RAM, Windows 98 SE, Voodoo 3 3000 AGP
