by Rob Northrup.  (No C 1998, but be sure to stroke me if you steal
my shit.

WHAT A BRILLIANT DAMN IDEA! MOVIE REVIEWS AND WRITING TIPS ALL IN ONE!
I was inspired this weekend by EVENT HORIZON, such a sub-mediocre
movie that you can learn lessons from its mistakes that will help you
write better!

   If you have an eye for titles, you know this movie is already off
to a bad start. Isn't that the movie where they're underwater and 
there's some creepy thing after 'em?  Or was that "Deep Impact?" At
least it's not the Number One stupidest action movie title of all
time, which goes to EXECUTIVE DECISION.  Does some marketer in LA 
think the more sleepy and abstracty the title, the more excitement
we'll expect in the movie?
   No, there's no underwater creeps in this once, nor asteroids nor 
comets the size of Texas. [Incidentally, if a comet the size of Texas
came down and smashed JUST into Texas, I'd be okay with that.]
   No, Event Horizon was just another haunted abandoned spaceship
movie with a second rate cast. It wanted to be Alien, it could have 
been Hellraiser VIII where the ship itself was the Lamentation Cube. 
Even Sam Neill's checkerboard-slashed face in the last third of Event 
Horizon makes him look like a two-bit Pinhead.  And nobody you give a
shit about survives to the end, so as a pure sci-fi action movie, it 
wasn't even that hot.
   They tried to steal some details from the Alien series, like having 
a half-British cast, and the co-ed crew playing slap-n-tickle in their
undies as they get into their stasis pods.  It turns out to be only 
the worst bits of Aliens get stolen, combined with a few other sci-fi
cliches.  Watch Aliens, the Hellraiser series and read "The Jaunt" by
Stephen King and you'll see everything from Event Horizon done more 
skillfully and in their original forms.
   What's worse, Event Horizon wanted to be a haunted house in space 
so bad, they even stole classic bits from The Haunting of Hill House.
At one point we see a steel door getting dented by some pounding 
monster on the other side (we're never told what exactly caused it).  
Add some guilty visions of dead people who our heroes neglected or 
allowed to die, and all the creepy point-of-view shots, and you have 
cliches represented from at least three genres of movies.
   Laurence Fishburne was pretty good as the captain.  If you get him 
confused with Samuel L. Jackson, there's an easy litmus test to tell 
them apart: if the movie is critically and popularly acclaimed and has 
a disgusting amount of hype, and/or if the movie is a product of 
Quentin Tarantino, then it's Samuel L. Jackson.  If you don't hear 
much about the movie and it's gone from theaters within two to three 
weeks, it's Mr. Fishburne.  Don't get me wrong, he's good, but he 
can't pick a superstar script, or can't get picked by a superstar 
script.
   Another factor assuring this film's mediocrity was Sam Neill.  
Is it Neill or O'Neill?  Can you bring yourself to care?  Everything 
Mr. Neill is in turns to yawns and slips off screens without much 
notice, with the possible exception of Jurassic Park, but of course 
Jurassic Park sucked dinosaur-sized eggs in spite of its box office 
take.  Sam isn't that bad an actor either, but he sure can't attach 
himself to a cool movie.
   How else can I bitch about it from a purely cinematic standpoint?
Oh yeah, sparks! Can you get some effects other than sparks and rains
of sparks and more of the same white, streaking sparks?  The zero 
gravity water beads was a cute effect, especially when they reactivate 
the gravity and it all splashed down, but sparks from the ship getting 
torn up, sparks from equipment banging as they fly out the busted 
hull, sparks from control panels exploding... Try some other kinds of 
spark powder or something.

   First storytelling problem with Event Horizon was the overall 
character flimsiness across the board.  It's the Stan Lee/Sgt. Rock 
school of character development.  Our hero is surrounded by a team of 
wacky characters, who can only be distinguished from each other by 
their technical proficiencies (like Gunner or Doc or Radar), or by 
nationality (like O'Malley or Vito or Rodriguez).  You may have 
noticed that X-Men comics suck for this same reason with their one 
Irish character and one Southern belle and maybe a Russian for good 
measure.
   This method of character creation takes about ten seconds to 
brainstorm, and then you can stick them in your plot and run with it. 
It even spices up your dialog slightly when you lean heavily on these 
cheap characterizations, because Doc always talks about life and 
people and problems in medical metaphors, and O'Malley says "Faith 
'n' begora" alot, and with Rodriguez you get to use all seven of those 
words you still remember from your high school Spanish class.
   Not only does Event Horizon have cookie-cutter characters, they 
even give you a shitty scene in which Captain Fishburne introduces 
all of them with a one-line characterization each, as if to prove 
they have no more depth than would fit in one line.  Amazingly 
similar to the two-page spread they used to have in the start of 
every Sgt. Rock comic, introducing you to The Swede and Doc and 
Dum-dum.  Laurence says, "The grinning idiot in the corner is Joe, 
and our chief navigator here is Smitty.  And that gloomy gus over 
there is DJ."  I'm paraphrasing part of that, but I remember the 
"gloomy gus" bit.  How could Fishburne say that line without laughing 
at how stupid it sounded?
   If you're writing an adventure story about a group of people, even 
if you're more focused on the damn vehicle they use or what they're 
questing for, please don't do a Sgt. Rock.  Either take the time to 
flesh them out, or introduce them quickly as Joe, Harry, Fred and 
Tim, and then forget them while you move your focus back to Our Hero.
   Another problem with Event Horizon was their Play-Skool technology.  
Space suits with electromagnetic boots to stick to the sides of the 
ship are one thing, but would they really have red and green 
indicator lights on the sides of the boot to let you know when 
they're on or off?  Maybe to let your AUDIENCE know they're on, but 
I think you'd find a better place for the wearer to see them.  Unless 
they were electromagnetic space boots for little kids that blink with 
every step you take.
   As the search and rescue ship enters the atmosphere of Neptune to 
find the lost ship Event Horizon, our heroes are shaken by turbulence, 
all of them strapped in their chairs frantically screaming statistics 
to the Captain, something about, "We're coming near a huge blip on 
the radar screen, Cap'n! It might be the ship we're looking for! 
Approaching at 800 kliks! 700! 600! 500!..."
   They should have been screaming, "Cap'n, it looks like our story is 
going too slow! Sleeping audience members have increased from 30% to 
50%. We're losing them! We have to shout about something and act 
excited or else they'll all go to sleep! Reaching 60%, Captain!
70! 80!"
   They can put colonies on the Moon and mines on Mars, and they 
still have to freak out every time the ship enters an atmosphere?  
Come on.
   Which reminds me... The movie starts with a timeline flashed across 
the screen. 2015--First colony on the Moon. 2032--Mining begins on 
Mars, etc. This brings up two no-nos in my mind.  For one thing, does 
every god damn sci-fi movie have to flash their back story across the 
screen?  Is it impossible to work it into the action discretely?  At 
least a narrator reciting that shit is a little better, though not 
ideal.
   [And who started this asinine idea of "mining" nearby planets?  
How could anyone extract any substance from another planet that would 
be valuable enough to justify all the money for the vast ships and 
the expensive life support systems for the miners?  Unless you're 
talking about terraforming the other planets first, which would be 
much more colossal news than the fuckin mining in the first place.  
That would be like saying "1988--Berlin Wall crumbles. 1989--Soviet 
Union dissolved. 1990--A man in Kosovo found a piece of rose quartz 
in his driveway."]
   The other no-no, and my big pet peeve, is listing EXACT YEARS in 
which your sci-fi story takes place.  It's so tired and ridiculous.  
Speculative fiction, sure you gotta speculate, but it's like 
speculating your tell-all memoirs and dropping real names; "For a 
while I was boinking Loni Anderson, but then I dropped her when I got 
a piece of Demi Moore (she was still on the rebound from Bruce), and 
that was just a little bit before I got in with that twisted thing 
between Claire Danes and Christina Ricci and Scary Spice."  Nobody's 
gonna believe you can make it with any of those women, and I can't 
believe your date predictions will be anywhere near the mark.  Nobody 
in five hundred years of sci-fi has come close to getting their 
predicted years right, except maybe 1984 and I'd argue that one.
   My recommendation to sci-fi writers, even if you ignore all my 
other advice, is please stop trying to get the dates right.  Because 
you won't.  Just hint that it's the near future, or even the far 
future. People won't get any better feel for the atmosphere if you 
tell them it's set in 2040, because every dumb mutherscratcher has a 
different idea of what life will be like in 2040. Haven't you learned 
that from reading too much sci-fi YET?
   Hell, I guess it's important to try for details like the years 
your story takes place.  But mark my words, when those people in 2042 
read your story, they're all gonna laugh at you.  You go ahead and 
speculate on your dates if you must, I'll be busy speculating on my 
tell-all memoirs, if Christina and Scary will please get off each 
other for a moment and quit blocking my view of the monitor! Dammit! 
Not on my lap! Thank you, ladies...
   Let's move along to the next lesson. If you're writing a sci-fi 
story and the ship's hull gets breached somehow, your characters 
should probably not be holding onto chairs and railings as all the 
air and wrenches and papers get sucked out into space, yelling, 
"Stark, the hull has been breached and we're experiencing explosive 
decompression!"  "Good lord, no!  Alright everybody, HOLD YOUR 
BREATH!"  They actually had a character who gets sorta hypnotized 
into opening his airlock door so he would die, and Cap'n Laurence 
tells the poor dude (after he breaks the trance and tries to 
deactivate the airlock door that's about to open), "Close your eyes 
and empty all the air out of your lungs!"  Excuse me, but isn't there 
a reason they call it "explosive" decompression?  Wouldn't they call 
it "air whistling out the hole for five minutes while your feet get 
sucked toward the door and finally you find a little Dutch boy to put 
his finger in the leak" decompression if it were otherwise?
   Yes, Event Horizon had two or three instances of gradual "go ahead 
and patch that leak whenever you get a chance" decompression.  The 
repair to the breached hull is eventually made with a giant rivet gun.  
Interesting how they can seal the system air-tight with giant rivets.  
The rivet gun is also the best idea they could come up with for a 
weapon later in the movie.  Maybe they just wanted to save money on 
props.
   The only reason to rent Event Horizon would be if you're a hardcore 
sci-fi lover and you need to explain "warp drive" or "hyper space" to 
your slow cousin the sci-fi layman.  Sam Neill is the inventor of 
"what we call the Gravitation Drive" and boy, is he pleased with 
himself.  This is the big scientific wonder of the whole movie.  He 
explains this WILD, EERIE concept of how time and space could be 
-- GET THIS! -- folded, so you could move more quickly from one point
to the other.  If you're a sci-fi buff older than eleven, or if 
you've seen more than a half dozen episodes of Star Trek, then you 
know that this concept of a device that "folds space" or takes you 
through another dimension to travel, is about 50 years old at least.
   There's just something about the way Sam Neill gleefully explains 
this AMAZING NEW idea that's so old to fandom.  I picture him 
standing in front of a business convention of Ginsu execs, telling 
them how he has discovered a method of chipping flint to give it a 
cutting edge, smirking as he cuts through a fish with it.
   Finally, let's not forget your best reason for watching a bad 
movie.  Not only will you learn from their mistakes.  You also get a 
heap of inspiration when you can honestly say, "I know I can write 
better than that shit."  If you can write your own name, you can 
probably write a better story than EVENT HORIZON.
   
   [I also watched U-TURN this weekend, but I was drawn into it more 
and can't bitch as much.  Even with my stupid VCR overheating and 
shutting itself off every twenty minutes, I was sucked into the story 
and distracted from finding fault.  Nice ending, hard to see where it 
would go, but I'm not sure if that's because the characters were 
complex, or so poorly defined that you couldn't tell what they would 
do next.  Watch this movie for the music by Ennio Morricone and for 
Billy Bob Thornton's belly button.]

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