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67Event Horizon could have used a decent script, but the director, Paul Anderson, is a stylist to watch.
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63It has been said that no one sees a movie for the sets, yet an exception might be made here for Horizon's visually staggering production design -- truly an event itself. The story, though, is such a transparent variation on the Alien ouevre that your tolerance may hinge on how much you can shrug this off. [15Aug1997 Pg03.D]
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60Superbly styled in techno-Gothic space-grunge chic, this sci-fi/horror cross-breed is a directorial triumph of reference and homage.
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60Director Paul Anderson, whose last film was "Mortal Kombat," well knows how to build suspense and increase tension. But counterbalancing all of that is Event Horizon's position as a sci-fi splatter film, intent on drenching the screen in blood and gore whenever possible. [15Aug1997 Pg 16]
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50The screenplay creates a sense of foreboding and afterboding, but no actual boding.
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50The settings and visual effects are imaginatively done, but the dialogue is silly and the plot is a mishmash, with echoes of everything from the "Aliens" movies to Michael Crichton's novel "Sphere," which pushes similar buttons a little more intelligently.
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50It's not a great film, but Event Horizon produces an intense sense of visual involvement. The hallucinatory, almost 3-D-like scenes stick in the mind.
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50But in its own overblown, melodramatic way, complete with hideous and obtrusive music by Michael Kamen, clanging sound effects that will leave your ears ringing and a penchant on the part of director Paul Anderson ( "Mortal Kombat" ) for quick flashes of blood-drenched gore, Event Horizon is kind of a hoot.
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50Half of what's going on is never explained, and what is explained, doesn't make much sense. And that's just the beginning of the problems encountered in director Paul Anderson's ("Mortal Kombat") poorly executed endeavor.
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50Contraryto its exciting advertising, Event Horizon is not the most frightening movie ever made. If anything, the conventional pop-up scares and gross-out effects of this British haunted-space-ship story seem less terrifying than quaint.
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50This unwieldy amalgam of science fiction and horror, directed by Paul Anderson, douses almost every scene with glitzy special effects in a futile attempt to cover up a paucity of thought.
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50Despite game efforts from a first-rate cast and acres of impressive production values, Event Horizon remains a muddled and curiously uninvolving sci-fi horror show.
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40The film is content to relentlessly scream "Boo!" behind the audience's back rather than provide any real thrills.
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40From its marketing-impaired title on down, Event Horizon is a steadily churning debacle that promises much more than it can deliver and ends up drowning in a crimson sea of gore and maddeningly out-of-place steals from other, better genre shockers.
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40The worst thing about Event Horizon--written by Philip Eisner, directed by Paul Anderson--isn't all the gore decorating the 21st-century space ship that gives the movie its name, but the filmmakers' reliance on shock edits and headache-inducing sound F/X to obscure the fact that this is one of the most derivative movies to hit screens in memory.
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The movie looks great at first, with interesting spaceship designs and genuinely creepy abandoned interiors, and the initial idea had plenty of potential. But by the time the story gets rolling, the filmmakers are trying unsuccessfully to scare the audience with sudden loud noises and gallon upon gallon of fake blood.
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30The movie is very loud. It is pointlessly loud, arbitrarily loud, assaultively loud.
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10It's too bad, then, that Anderson (whose only other major credit is "Mortal Kombat," but of course) and first-time screenwriter Philip Eisner felt so compelled to do away with suspense and turn Event Horizon into a big-budget slasher film.
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Trying to figure out just what went wrong in the creation of a movie as dreadful as this may ultimately be as futile as trying to ascertain what might lie on the "other side" of a black hole.
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0If you haven't lived until you've seen Laurence Fishburne and Sam Neill duke it out in a vat full of red paint, here's your chance; personally, my idea of hell would be having to see this stinker again.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 10 out of 16
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Mixed: 0 out of 16
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Negative: 6 out of 16
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KurtM.10
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EricC.0