Today is a great holiday - the Day of Cosmonautics and I want to remember a movie, which perfectly demonstrates that the space can be a very dangerous place.
I'm talking about the sci-fi thriller Event Horizon, which was made by the Paul W.S. Anderson, director of the cult Mortal Kombat, before he went to work on the series Resident Evil in which he pitted his wife Mila Jovovich against hordes of monsters and zombies.
The film failed miserably at the box office, but subsequently gained cult fame among fans of horror and science fiction.
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In the distant future, mankind tries to conquer space and tests the first starship equipped with hyperspace technology.
The starship disappears during the test and reappears a few years later at the back of the solar system. A rescue expedition headed by the brave Captain Miller (Laurence Fishburne) and brilliant scientist Dr. Weir (Sam Neill) is rushed to it.
Arriving at their destination, the rescuers find no trace of the crew's presence, but reconstructing the data, they conclude that the missing crew encountered something more than a technical glitch or space anomaly.
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Event Horizon is first and foremost an astronomical term for the boundary of a black hole, beyond which a body will certainly be swallowed by it. In other words, the cosmic darkness has prepared a path where everything bad that can happen is bound to happen and there is no turning back, and the spirit of this hopelessness and doom pervades the film from the beginning to the end credits.
And this sensation is strengthened not by plot twists, but by the atmosphere of the film - deep-black color scale, far from cheerful design of spaceships, gloomy music, in which the orchestral part was prepared by Michael Kamen, who had works for Disney and collaborated with Metallica, and electronic part - with the legendary Orbital.
By the way, the inspiration for the design of the ships was Notre Dame Cathedral.
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nitially, the studio insisted that the "heroes of the occasion" were alien creatures, but Anderson abandoned the idea of filming his version of "Aliens" and insisted on his vision - eventually presenting a completely unexpected for the time - "space haunted house". A natural occult horror crossed with the aesthetics of the Warhammer 40,000 universe and multiplied by Cthulhu's father Howard Phillips Lovecraft's much-loved strange dimensions where powerful dark forces reign supreme.
I first watched it in the early 2000s and was blown away by what I saw. A few months ago I stumbled across it on a late-night channel and couldn't tear myself away. Despite the fact that so much time has passed and I remember the movie pretty well - it was creepy as hell.
Later I found out that they had cut about half an hour of scenes from the movie, which the studio bosses considered too violent, and the director's version never saw the light, as the cut segments were immediately deleted to avoid problems with the press and religious organizations.
There is still a legend among horror fans that there are tapes with the full version, but it is rather a myth that keeps the interest in this undeservedly neglected film afloat.
Enjoy watching it.
9 out of 10
@NoiseCash | @Twitter
based on my article for russian Cinema World magazine
