A Study In

(I am going to talk in spoiler-ific verse about “Event Horizon.” This movie came out over ten years ago, so I don’t feel bad about it.)

Thelonious Monk was once asked how one should go about being innovative. He was sitting at a piano at the time, so he looked down and tapped a few keys, then said: “You can’t play new notes, that’s impossible. So you have to just play the ones you really mean.” (not an exact quote, but close)

The question, when making film, is not whether you shall rip something off, but instead who you’ll be ripping off, and to what degree this theft will happen. Pick the right source and you piggy-back their successes, choose wrong and you inherit the whirlwind. If you do it too little, your movie sucks, I personally guarantee you. If you do it too much, it’s like getting caught with your hand in the cookie jar, and the suspension of disbelief shatters. In music, the struggle for originality is more sophisticated, because musicians must accept a limited range of chord progressions and notes (so far as I know). In film, however, the illusion of creating something genuinely untouched persists, because the elements of storytelling are hidden, and more malleable. Almost any fundamental rule of storytelling can be correctly violated, normally by working in careful concert with the elements that remain. Anyone who has watched and appreciated “2001: A Space Odyssey” will inform you that it openly violates basic rules of pacing and character development, and instead of suffering for it, the film because a masterpiece. On top of this, a good story hides its structure from the audience, sucking them into a narrative through line that obscures what’s going on back stage. This means it’s extremely hard to deconstruct a good movie and see how it ticks (which is why analyzing bad cinema is a valuable and underrated practice).

Therefore, almost more than music, storytelling needs a strong element of homage (in most cases, but admittedly not absolutely all) to ground it, both in the creator’s mind and the audience’s. Which brings me to my point: last night I watched “Event Horizon” again. Do any of you remember this movie? I hadn’t seen it in years. When I first encountered it, I was much younger than I am now, and that will become relevant in a moment. I saw a space ship, Sam Neil, and the promise of some scares, and that was pretty much all I needed to hear. Sign me up. When the credits rolled, I was thoroughly sickened and wanted to go crawl in a hole. It contained a kind of violence that I didn’t think people put in cinema (how little I knew), and dealt with subject matter so thoroughly grim that it blocked my ability to absorb it on a B-movie level. I’ve had an aversion to the movie ever since, looking at it kind of like it’s that guy you know who takes jokes too far, so you’re afraid to even make eye contact. For some reason, though, I’ve just been terribly in the mood to see a haunted spaceship. I just want that. Maybe it was my abortive attempt to sit through Tarkovsky’s “Solaris” (I’m going to try again, knowing this time what I’m getting into), maybe it was playing “Dead Space,” maybe it was any number of things. The point is, the genre is frightfully small and I needed a fix. Now much older, I couldn’t remember what the hell happened in the movie, and the lure of something provocative ended up working in “Event Horizon’s” favor. So I grabbed it and gave it a watch through.

I have no idea what I think of it. I know I enjoy watching it, and would possibly buy it, but I suspect there is a simple reason for this: “Event Horizon” is a complete, omnidirectional rip off.

There’s something weirdly classy about “Horizon,” but I don’t believe for a moment that occurred on purpose; elements just fell into place with good fortune, but there was nobody at the head of this thing who thought “class” would be associated with it. The title is good, it sounds just right and feels satisfying to say, and unlike the vast majority of B-movies, they managed to get two genuinely brilliant actors in the lead roles (Laurence Fishburne and Sam Neil). These guys are artists who we all know and like, but never get to see front and center in an interesting project. On top of that, the design of the titular ship “Event Horizon” is breathtaking. A little research reveals the art department was heavily influenced by cathedrals, and whoever came up with that idea needs a raise. The concept is also elegant in its simplicity: a prototype spaceship built for warp travel disappears on its maiden voyage, then mysteriously reappears years later with its crew absent. What happened? It’s one of those great plots you feel like you know but can’t remember anything that’s done it recently.

And yet, those elements aside, most of the movie is just nothing. Very few characters connect, there is not a single fairly earned scare in the piece, and so much of what transpires doesn’t even begin to make sense. It’s very clear that the talent behind the camera is not sensitive to the tremendous head start that the things listed above give them, and they forge ahead into predictable nonsense. Many movies have experienced a similar fate and vanished forever, but “Event Horizon” seems to persist. It comes up in pop culture from time to time, it gets mentioned next to “Alien” (albeit on a much lower level) when discussing spaceship design, and every now and then you meet a staunch believer in the flick. How is this possible? Simple.

Ripping off.

Paul WS Anderson, the man behind such abortive failures as “Aliens Vs. Predator” and “Mortal Kombat” (I confess to adoring his “Resident Evil” trilogy for some reason), made one cunning decision for this outing, which saved his movie from obscurity: ape from good sources. The most prominent source he lifts from is “The Shining,” a movie that was mentioned in the earliest pitch meetings. Watching “Horizon,” you feel a vague twinge of Kubrick like an itch you can’t scratch, especially when naked women begin emerging from baths. Then a river of blood appears, and you begin wondering if the Kubrick Estate is suing these people. Sam Neil’s character, the guy who designed the titular ship and is now intent on discovering what has happened to her, smacks of Nicholson’s Jack Torrence: both are men of questionable sanity at the outset, and both become the vessel for tremendous evil by the end. Some have criticized Neil’s Dr. Weir as having an incoherent arc, seemingly drifting between confused good guy and all out baddie throughout the second act. While I agree with them, I think I actually enjoyed this ambiguity, because it reminded me of the hazy arc that Torrence experiences. Stephen King’s original novel started Jack as a sane man with demons who goes over the edge, but Kubrick tweaked it to a guy whose madness is already formed and ready to be activated. It was a brilliant decision: we as the audience know this guy is not all right in the opening frames, so he becomes a ticking bomb and a source of tension. Weir functioned much the same way.

The second major source of cribbing is “Alien,” but there’s nothing really substantive to discuss there, since it’s mostly an art design element, and my focus is on story. I will say that the design of the ships, especially the “Event Horizon” itself, is tremendously accomplished.

The third source of theft is where the movie throws you a left hook, and unquestionably is the cause of my childhood discomfort with the film: “Hellraiser.” It must be fairly stated that no significant movie I’m aware of had attempted the fusion of spaceship-horror with a Clive Barker influence. That’s a new one. Sitting through the movie the first time, I genuinely did not see it coming. Demonic horror actually fits pretty well into the empty chasms of a monstrous black spaceship. The problem is, it’s demonic horror. Now this is a personal taste thing, but if you’re asking me to enjoy myself at the movies, I just cannot have direct contact with people being tortured in Hell. It doesn’t work for me. I can deal with people getting killed, but knowing that their souls are suffering for all eternity? Jeez, man, that’s a little much for a Saturday night. As much as I love “Drag Me To Hell,” a similar problem occurs there as well.

The upside is, when played correctly Hell is genuinely frightening, because humanity has always had an unconscious awareness of its existence. “Event Horizon” manages to instill some genuine dread in the viewer by displaying horrifying gore, but only for just a moment. They push one step farther than you think they will, but before you can ready yourself to handle it, it’s usually gone. It was still a bit much for my taste, but I had to concede that they were making it work. Knowing it was too good to be true, I did some more digging and found out that the director’s cut contained about half an hour more of this kind of brutality, but test audiences were losing their lunches, so they cut it. I don’t blame those focus groups, the beginning of the movie plays so nice and classy that the direction the climax goes is genuinely jarring. The cut that was finally released is jarring in a trashy, but arguably good, way; the director’s cut would have just been trash.

That said, “Event Horizon” may be the best horror movie ever made without a single scare. It tries for many scares, they all fail. All of them. A few are jump-inducing, but they’re disingenuous and annoying. “The Shining” is also pretty low on the straight pop-out count, but Kubrick was sly enough not to care. Anderson is a little insecure, so he slams a couple of stingers in for good measure, which end up detracting from the piece as a whole. Particularly egregious are what I call “cut-ins:” pop-outs constructed in the editing bay by introducing an incredibly loud flashback for thirty frames; I suspect that much of the time, these scenes weren’t even intended to have scares in them (the telltale sign is when the actor doesn’t react violently enough). “Event Horizon” has several of these, and it’s just annoying.

So there you have it, I suppose. For every good thing in this movie, there’s a bad thing in this movie. Most of its virtues, I’m convinced, are profoundly accidental, so I have a hard time giving Anderson any credit for them. And yet, the movie draws me back, perhaps because it flirts with the potential for greatness without ever getting there. Perhaps because whenever I’m conflicted about a movie, I’m not conflicted about a movie; any movie that makes me watch it again will eventually become dear to me. And I will watch “Event Horizon” again. God help me, but I will.