House: ---
Publisher: Bantam Spectram
Date: Fall 1997
Format: --- minutes
We should've listened to Siskel & Ebert and Randall Schwartz and avoided this. They should have been much more forceful in warning people away. This wasn't SF, it was a slasher film. "Blood, with occasional loud noises."
Seeing Weis shave (with a straight razor!?), I almost expect him to slit his throat. There's the first loud noise, the BANG! of his hatch opening. Why is Daylight Station so big, but has only a few hab modules scattered about its truss?
The _Lewis and Clark_ appears to have artificial gravity (and this technology is confirmed with the _Event Horizon_), so why do they need "gravity couches" (which should be called "acceleration tanks")? (And they do double duty, putting the crew in "stasis.") Note that, since they're in a semicircle, some are *parallel* to the acceleration vector, so the occupant would be pressed against the side, not evenly on their back. Why the obligatory backlit fans all over the flight deck? Why the silly motorized captain's chair (which looks like it was stolen from "Contact's" pod)? How do you get 30g out of an *ion* drive? Why are the supposedly professional crews in these films (see "Aliens") always surly and never briefed? Why is it that the male crewmembers always have girly pinups in their bunks, but the females never have beefcake?
(The acknowledgement of acceleration and long travel times is, at least, commendable.)
What's with the cigarettes? They smoke before getting into the tanks, after, while at the conference table, while helping others on with their suits. Four of them suit up and go in, but why isn't a backup team already suited up to follow? What's with the silly drop-down floor to get to the hatch -- why not have the hatch on the same level? You could fall into the pit.
The _Event Horizon_ is in a "decaying orbit," which has somehow decayed right *into* Uranus's upper atmosphere, yet the ship is still in freefall! (As evidenced by the L&C's hovering next to it, and the weightless trash onboard.) The _L&C_ has wings, implying it ventures into atmospheres on a regular basis, yet the flight deck seats don't have seat belts and the captain's seat swings madly from the overhead. They can't find the _EH_ on sensors, but they plow right ahead regardless and almost crash into it. Uranus is in the outer solar system, very dark, yet the clouds seen outside the windows are bright blue. (And it's not the lightning, since that's intermittent.)
"That's not a loadbearing member --" CLUNK "It is now." No it's not! You'd think a professional space S&R team would recognize that a ship's main spine is preferable to an antenna mount for docking their ship. You'd think that if the _EH_ had an airlock there, it would have standard docking hardware, too.
I didn't even notice that the _Event Horizon_ was cruciform in shape, so fixated was I on its resemblance to a Klingon ship. The cross-shaped windows. Who builds an experimental research ship this huge and with this much ornamentation? Why the brick-like panelling, and the oversized circuit patterns on the bricks? And what ergonomics expert decided "steel" was a cheerful color? Okay, the movie's production team modeled it after some gothic cathedrals, which might make sense if this was some sort of cruise ship (for vampires?), but not a research vessel.
Why is the spine corridor oval and lit *green*? Why are the explosives so inconveniently placed on the deck? There's the main hatch to the foredecks, but the three smaller ones around it -- what are those for? Why are the hatches so non-standardized and heavy? Why does the one to the engine room have spikes?
That's not a magnetoquench corridor or a meat grinder, it's a carnival ride. "When the three magnetic fields align, the gateway opens." If the fields are rigidly affixed to the rings, then they align about every ten seconds. What's with the carnival/vanity mirror lights on the rings, and the spike on the outermost? Why the spikes on the engine room walls? The gateway sphere is tiled with hundreds of circles. When we get the closeup of the pie segments opening, that apparently applies to the center feature opening; we then zoom out and see the six around it opening. Presumably they all open, but where do they *go*? They entire sphere vanishes. Let's stick the computer and ladderway accesses behind anonymous panels of the walls (it's like TARDIS roundels). As Weis crawls into HAL and finds the one panel that *isn't* backlit green gels. The computer was apparently designed by ants, or people who *enjoy* crawling through A/C ducting.
So Weis decides to brief the crew *as* they're exploring the ship. Stupid! Brief them completely *before* they enter -- as soon as he'd admitted he'd designed the ship, the crew should have *insisted*! The crew member enters the engine room and the gateway opens, it fills with a black liquid pool (like an Anti-StarGate). Why does he stick his hand in it?! How stupid do you have to be?! Why are they carrying *narrow-beam* flashlights? What's the point of flashlights on the toes of their boots if the helmets are shaped so that you can't see below your chin? The clear visor also affords easy access to the temples, where you *can't* turn your head to look out.
Let's fill the sickbay with sharp objects to fly around and injure people! What's with the machete-sized hacksaw -- a bonesaw, maybe? Why wasn't it better lit? Were the bridge terminals supposed to look like pinball machines?
Weis places one of the corridor explosives in the EVA deck of the _L&C_, and the crewmember who finds it ignores the prominent "disarm" button. It goes off, and causes the ship to explode in a series of explosions, for to aft. What was it, a smart bomb that talked to the ship's systems and convinced them to cooperate?
"Where we're going, we don't *need* eyes." Thank you, Doc Brown. We don't *need* our vermiform appendix, either, but do we go around tearing it out? Let's trick him: "I bet we won't need heads, either." "Ooh, good point!" says Weis, who obligingly pulls off his head and dies. Or maybe "I bet we won't need genitals," and he yanks his off, falling over in excruciating pain. Do the undead fall over and become sopranos if you knee them in the cajones? "Wolfman has nads!"
"Evil will always triumph, because good is stupid." Apparently true evil is also stupid, or at least incapable of much forethought. Gee, Weis, why don't you shoot the window to get the guy in the spacesuit outside? They you can get flushed into vacuum (or Uranian methane clouds). Apparently it can reach into your head and create physical apparitions, and operate the lights, but it can't talk reliably to computers. (Or, if the Evil had truly possessed the _EH_ and brought it to life, the ship was pretty stupid too.)
They make a big deal out of the lethal CO2 levels. Trying to leave, they pull all the filters out of the _EH_ to return them to the _L&C_. But they all survive just fine for another couple of hours!
The three survivors are rescued, and the _EH_ closes the hatch on the Rescue 1 team. What's it gonna do without the gateway -- can the ship itself cause hallucinations and generate physical apparitions?
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