I agree, Event Horizon is the best Anderson movie I’ve seen, with the caveat that I haven’t seen his post-Resident Evil stuff, nor Soldier, and I’ve got a big soft spot for Kurt Russell. However, I am slightly more lukewarm on Event Horizon than a lot of folks. I haven’t watched it in some time, but I recall being underwhelmed. To some extent, I think it was over hyped to me, as my dad raved that it was terrifying when he saw it in the theater. I did not find that to be the case, but, in so far as haunted house movies go, it’s a decent one of those (IN SPAAAAAACE). My letterboxd says I gave it 3.5 stars and that still feels correct to me.
The thing that holds it back is that I think, in a different director’s hands, there is a legitimately terrifying movie to be made using most of the same ingredients. I’m by no means equivocating these movies, but an interesting point of comparison is the Solaris remake that Soderbergh and Clooney did in the early 00s. They share the conceit of “there is a mysterious entity in space which keeps showing one of the characters visions of his dead-by-suicide wife to disastrous effect” (insert weird-that-it-happened-twice.gif).
By all accounts, the Solaris remake is not an exceptional movie (in fact, EH is rated slightly higher with a 3.3 vs Solaris’ 3.2, for whatever that’s worth). Also, Solaris is very much a character drama first and foremost, but there are a few sequences which I found legitimately unsettling in ways that EH mostly failed to evoke, despite covering similar beats.
In fact, I think I’ve talked myself into doing this as a double feature. Solaris I saw on television probably close to 20 years ago, and Event Horizon I watched on a laptop in Afghanistan, so I could stand to revisit both of them. I’m curious if watching them together will enhance the experience in any way, or if it will just give me tonal whiplash lol
I agree, Event Horizon is the best Anderson movie I’ve seen, with the caveat that I haven’t seen his post-Resident Evil stuff, nor Soldier, and I’ve got a big soft spot for Kurt Russell. However, I am slightly more lukewarm on Event Horizon than a lot of folks. I haven’t watched it in some time, but I recall being underwhelmed. To some extent, I think it was over hyped to me, as my dad raved that it was terrifying when he saw it in the theater. I did not find that to be the case, but, in so far as haunted house movies go, it’s a decent one of those (IN SPAAAAAACE). My letterboxd says I gave it 3.5 stars and that still feels correct to me.
The thing that holds it back is that I think, in a different director’s hands, there is a legitimately terrifying movie to be made using most of the same ingredients. I’m by no means equivocating these movies, but an interesting point of comparison is the Solaris remake that Soderbergh and Clooney did in the early 00s. They share the conceit of “there is a mysterious entity in space which keeps showing one of the characters visions of his dead-by-suicide wife to disastrous effect” (insert weird-that-it-happened-twice.gif).
By all accounts, the Solaris remake is not an exceptional movie (in fact, EH is rated slightly higher with a 3.3 vs Solaris’ 3.2, for whatever that’s worth). Also, Solaris is very much a character drama first and foremost, but there are a few sequences which I found legitimately unsettling in ways that EH mostly failed to evoke, despite covering similar beats.
In fact, I think I’ve talked myself into doing this as a double feature. Solaris I saw on television probably close to 20 years ago, and Event Horizon I watched on a laptop in Afghanistan, so I could stand to revisit both of them. I’m curious if watching them together will enhance the experience in any way, or if it will just give me tonal whiplash lol