in hero mode, radiating with steely confidence as he runs from one Giger-esque corridor to the next. The same goes for Jason Isaacs, whose mild mannered D.J., the crew’s doctor, thrives from the actor’s knack to exude what can best be described as “silent intelligence.” When the two of them slowly unravel the chilling distress call they’ve recovered, their chemistry sells their shared fear like two door-to-door salesmen. Of course, it also helps that Anderson enlisted an enviable assembly of character actors to actually give a damn about. True to his soft-spoken cadence, Neill makes that science very easy to chew on, so easy that you start feeling a little too comfortable as the story hits hyperdrive, so when he finally does turn, you feel just as betrayed as Miller and the gang. You need to understand the concepts in order to fully comprehend what’s exactly at stake, especially the sacrifice Miller makes at the very end, when he submits to the inter-dimensional hell in order to save his crew, among them being Nip/Tuck babe Joley Richardson and The Wood hunk Richard T.
Nailing that exposition is a crucial component of Event Horizon, namely because those gluttonous details are paramount to the film’s underlying horror. Naturally, he brought that same addicting charm to his role as Weir, a character that’s straddled with all kinds of interstellar exposition, all of which he delivers with ease. As Grant, Neill spends most of his time in Jurassic Park breaking down prehistoric science and making archaeology sound like Disneyland, which is arguably why most kids begged their parents to hit up museums on their way out of theaters during the summer of 1993. At the top of the pile was Neill’s uncanny ability to extrapolate complicated details.
Having everyone’s favorite paleontologist gouge out his eyeballs and slice up his face like a holiday ham was a brilliant move on Anderson’s behalf - and for multiple reasons. And while, yes, he did play Satan’s son Damien in Graham Baker’s 1981 sequel, Omen III: The Final Conflict, Neill was really only one thing to young teenagers across America: Dr. Lest we forget, only four years prior he was running around saving Joseph Mazzello and Ariana Richards from carnivorous dinosaurs and tree-dwelling Ford Explorers in Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park. Now, it’s probably a generational thing, but seeing the New Zealand actor go from a hunky doctor to a fucking cenobite by the film’s end was enough to send this writer to the theater’s lobby. In fact, he was so enthralled by the opportunity that he turned down offers to direct the Mortal Kombat sequel, Fox’s long-gestating X-Men, and that year’s Alien: Resurrection.īut, the film also did one other thing: It turned Sam Neill into a ghastly, treacherous villain. The English filmmaker had just finished adapting Mortal Kombat, aka the most controversial and violent video game of its time, and seeing how that film was only PG-13, he was jonesing to make an R-rated feature. It’s also incredibly painful, as most evangelicals will gladly tell you, and that was an area that Anderson knew all too well. William Weir ( Sam Neill) explains to Captain Miller ( Laurence Fishburne) during the film’s fiery finale, and its reality is much, much worse.
#Sam neill haunted space movie#
Working from a script by Philip Eisner, who penned a haunted house movie set in space and indebted to ghostly jaunts like Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and Robert Wise’s The Haunting, Anderson wielded a brand of deep space terror that went far beyond any venomous extraterrestrials and went straight to hell.
Anderson offered another spin on the genre: he re-introduced it to horror. By then, sci-fi was experiencing a slight renaissance, what with Barry Sonnenfield’s quirky buddy cop comedy Men in Black and Luc Besson’s stunning magnum opus The Fifth Element, but director Paul W.S.
Event Horizon isn’t exactly original, but it is terrifying, and that meant something in 1997.
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