Tuesday, October 15, 2013

The Bar's My Destination

Event Horizon (1997)
directed by Paul W.S. Anderson
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
streamed from Netflix

One of my favorite anecdotes that Wiley Wiggins relates on his blog concerns the years he spent trying to discover the name of a movie that he watched as a child. He describes "the gracefully waving duckweed and the almost silent globe of billowing gas," and although this relationship with memory and haunting mirrors the film he eventually found, it's the wording I particularly admire. Even if you've never seen Solaris, you can imagine that duckweed in the water.

Now of course, I didn't hear about Andrei Tarkovsky until college, and I missed Event Horizon as a 17-year-old. To say that the latter is slapdash might be obvious, but for the longest time this seemed to be the Paul Anderson movie that critics pointed to (before critics came around) when arguing that Anderson had "potential" as a director. But Event Horizon is straight pastiche, with none of the happy irreverence of Alien vs. Predator or subversive eroticism of Soldier.

Although I respect Anderson's specific decisions within the larger context of taking on a production after the release date was set (i.e., introducing ghosts in place of monsters), I'm not convinced that a better movie was left on the cutting room floor. I don't want to make the simple point that Anderson has no business mixing and matching his influences. As I've said before, these early failures seemed to have encouraged him to not take himself so seriously. Producers can't be wrong all the time!

Sam Neill, surprisingly, seems more at home in the Hellraiser universe than as a Kris Kelvin doppelgänger. Maybe he was the reason that Joely Richardson reminded me of Laura Dern, but Anderson should have given Richardson more to do. The sets are believable, the crew a convincing team, and the scary stuff a little unnerving. That's three-star entertainment, but it wasn't ever a masterpiece.