EVENT HORIZON (1997)
RESIDENT EVIL (2002)


Event Horizon Starring: Sam Neill, Lawrence Fishburne, Joely Richardson. Director: Paul W. S. Anderson. Screenwriter: Philip Eisner.
Paul “Wide-Screen” Anderson (I have no idea what the actual W.S. stands for, but I always think “Wide Screen” when I see it) is a really great film-maker.   He knows how to frame a shot, how to track the camera, how to arrange the people and things in a scene within the shot for maximum effectiveness, and he knows how to build a sequence of shots so that tension mounts into a payoff.   Even within the shots, there are little bits of business that show he really wants to stimulate the ol' optic nerve.

As a film-maker, he’s really very, very good.   As a story-teller, on the other hand, he stinks on ice. 

Our first bit of evidence, or in layman’s terms, film, is one of his early efforts, Event Horizon, which Mr. Anderson directed (in wide-screen) but did not, according to the credits, write.   One Philip Eisner is responsible for our screenplay, though I’ve heard rumors that Andrew Kevin Walker, author of Seven, did some uncredited work on the script. 

And it might have been a good script, no matter who wrote it, but Mr. Anderson’s way with a camera got in the way of the story. 

If you haven’t seen the film, Sam Neill stars as a scientist who developed a faster-than-light drive on a ship, the “Event Horizon,” which disappeared on its maiden voyage seven years ago; it’s just reappeared out by Neptune, and Lawrence Fishburne and his crew are taking Neill out to take a look at it to find out where it’s been and what happened to the crew.  Once they get there, it’s not really clear what happened to the ship (aside from a couple of corpses, it’s empty and ship’s log is fragmented) but it seems to have gone into Hell itself, where it picked up either a bunch of sour ghosts or a very bad personality of its own.  Like I said, it’s not clear. 

And you can watch this film and see exactly how its murkiness came about.  In one scene, Lawrence Fishburne is confronted by the ghost of a man he had to abandon in a fire; we cut away before this is resolved, to a long pan of the outside of the ship, then cut back inside to Mr. Fishburne discussing this with another crew member.  So, uh, what was the point of that pan on the outside?   I can’t see it myself.  The only thing I can think of is (possibly) Mr. Anderson saying, “Cutting from one scene to an aftermath directly related to it—that’s dull!   I need to remind everyone that all the people are in space, and here’s a good time to do that!”   Of course, I don’t know that Mr. Anderson said that.   I have no idea what he was thinking at the time.  I’m just taking a wild guess.

Since this film isn’t an Anderson script, it’s not all that useful for getting the full flavor of Paul W. S. Anderson’s abilities with celluloid (we’ll leave that to our co-feature this month, Resident Evil).  But it does have some of his hallmarks.  As noted at the beginning, sequences are well-framed and edited and shot with a great deal of kinetic energy.  There’s one sequence where a crewman, driven mad by the “Event Horizon,” is going to throw himself out the airlock; this sequence, with its build up not only of the crewman’s dementia but the attempts to rescue him, works really well as pure cinema (and also works in the story quite nicely too). 

One suspects, though, that if Mr. Anderson were more concerned with story-telling, a number of the scenes here would either make better sense in context, or might have been eliminated.   There’s a long sequence where the rescue ship’s doctor is tormented by visions of her handicapped son.  The ship is preying on everyone’s fears, okay, but this is already known to everyone, including the doctor.  For her to run off in pursuit of this phantom makes no sense.  Similarly, what the heck is up with that ending?   Okay, I think I know the answer to both:  they’re great for shock-cuts, which, again, is cinematic but not narrative.

It’s not just individual scenes like this, but characters too.   Sam Neill seems twitchy from the get-go—rather than being a sympathetic figure being set up for a tragic fall (narrative), he seems weird and slightly nuts from his first scene (cinematic).   Nothing is done to establish him other than slightly nuts, then really nuts, then really really nuts.  He’s more like a prop than a character.   Similarly, as critic James Bowman points out, everyone on the ship is incredibly rude to everyone else.  This is (kind of) explained in a throwaway line about the crew being pulled off a well-earned rest, but that makes no narrative sense—it makes cinematic sense, in that the characters can be short-tempered and shout at each other, which can be used to tighten shots and build up tension.   One really silly scene shows Lawrence Fishburne and his second in command arguing over the nature of the situation they find themselves in.   Joely Richardson is explaining her theories about the ship, and her ideas are pretty interesting and tie in with what we’ve seen.  But Mr. Fishburne says he “doesn’t have time” to listen to this kind of stuff.  It makes sense in a cinematic way (the tension in the air) but it’s stupid in a narrative way.  They’re all in the midst of an unpredictably dangerous situation, Mr. Fishburne told Ms. Richardson to come up with some answers, why would he then tell her he doesn’t have time for information that might save all their lives? 

You got me.  Divorced from any real human interaction with its audience, Event Horizon (the movie) has some effective scenes and some cool atmosphere, but it can’t really scare us.  It can shock us and disgust us, true, but one gets the feeling from the story that it wants a lot more than that.  In order to scare me, you have to make me connect in a fundamental way with what’s happening on screen.  In order to shock me, or disgust me, all you need is a flash cut or some make-up effects, or both.  

In contrast, Lost Voyage took the same story (it was made a few years after Event Horizon) but personalized it, so that we were presented with characters with which we could sympathize.  When they met their fates, we could feel for them, rather than merely react to their grisly demises (which, to Lost Voyage’s credit, were more suggested than seen).   But that sort of thing probably wasn’t scheduled for Event Horizon.  Not enough time for it this year.  No, not with shooting all the shock cut stuff.   Maybe next year.  Ooh, or maybe for a sequel!    Event Horizon II:  Beyond This Horizon.    Worse things have happened.

Resident Evil Starring: Milla Jovovitch, zombie fodder. Director and image processor: Paul W. S. Anderson.
Case in point, tonight’s evidence, Resident Evil, which Mr. Anderson wrote and directed based on the popular series of games.  

…wow, did we just catch you off guard?  If you haven’t read our previous summation of Mr. Anderson and his film Event Horizon, well, that wasn’t very narrative of us…but it sure was cinematic!    You should have seen the look on your face!

In case you’d rather not bother, or you just have, the short version is that Mr. Anderson is very talented in film-making terms—setting up shots, editing sequences for maximum effectiveness, framing and building up tension…but as a storyteller, something one might think would be fundamental to a moviemaker, he…uh, falls short.  Resident Evil short.

Let me first say, as a caveat, that I have never played the games, so I don’t know how much of the things in this film, how many of the elements that comprise it, were forced on Mr. Anderson in order to comply with the game universe.   Generally, that sort of thing doesn’t tend to bother film-makers tasked with bringing a video game to the screen; the name, and its presumed built-in audience, is usually considered enough to tempt the masses to the Cineplex.   But I’ll be generous and assume that many of the contrivances here were originally in the games.