Event Horizon (1997) on Netflix
In 2047, the spaceship Event Horizon reappears in orbit around Neptune seven years after it vanished. Captain Miller's rescue crew boards it, joined by the ship's designer, Dr. William Weir.
- Netflix3.5/5
- IMDb6.6/10217,681 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes35%
Trailer
Plot summary
For seven years the Event Horizon has been missing, lost on its maiden voyage to Proxima Centauri. In 2047 the ship reappears in orbit around Neptune, and US Aerospace Command sends the rescue vessel Lewis and Clark to investigate. Captain Miller commands the mission, and Dr. William Weir, who designed the missing ship, comes along. Before the crew arrives, Weir explains the experimental gravity drive, which folds spacetime so a vessel can cross vast distances, and plays a recording recovered from the ship, full of screams and what might be a human voice. D.J., the crew's doctor, recognizes a Latin phrase in the recording and translates it as a plea for help. Aboard the ship, the crew finds signs of a massacre and begins searching for survivors.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Event Horizon (1997)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- During filming of the climax at Pinewood Studios, a fire broke out on Stage 7 when real flames and a wind machine ignited silk cloth covering the corridor set where Laurence Fishburne's character runs as the ship breaks apart, engulfing the stage within about a minute. The corridor set's large mirror had been imported from France to create an infinite-tunnel effect.
- Gary Sinise and Jeremy Irons both declined offers to play Dr. William Weir before Sam Neill took the part, drawn by the story's air of mystery and the chance to portray a grieving scientist whose greatest creation reappears after years of loss.
- Two weeks before principal photography, Paramount surveyed shoppers at a San Fernando Valley mall about what a black hole was; alarmed that few could define it, the studio pushed for the ship's connection to Hell to be made explicit, a change screenwriter Philip Eisner opposed.
- Designers scanned elements of Notre-Dame Cathedral into computers and worked them into the Event Horizon's thruster pods and structure, giving the ship an overall cruciform shape that from a distance looked like a crucifix hanging above Neptune.
- Laurence Fishburne contacted director Paul Anderson during production of The Matrix (1999) to thank him, saying the wire-work on Event Horizon had prepared him for that film's physical demands and that he would have died on The Matrix without it.
- Filmmaker William Malone accused Event Horizon of plagiarising his unproduced script Dead Star, in which a rescue crew finds an alien machine that opens a portal to Hell; he said it got "knocked off by five or six different movies, most notably Event Horizon".
- The scene in which Dr. Weir illustrates how wormholes work with a pen and paper was replicated in Christopher Nolan's Interstellar (2014) and Taika Waititi's Thor: Love and Thunder (2022); the rotating blade-lined tunnel leading to the engine room inspired Galaxy Quest's "Chompers" sequence.
