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Overview
In Season 02, we watched Europa Report, a movie that is touted as being realistic in its depiction of space travel. We liked that movie for its subtle and low-key portrayal of the monster. This brought up a discussion of Event Horizon, another space horror movie but with a totally different feel.
Now, by today’s standards, this movie is a bit cheesy, but its considered a classic of the genre. We not only discuss this movie and what we like and don’t like about it, but we compare and contrast it with Europa Report.
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Transcript
[00:05:08] Rhys: Yep. Did you enjoy event horizon?
[00:05:10] Stephen: Talk more about it. Okay, so we’ll just start there. We’ll do boom, sure. Our bonus episode. So did I enjoy event horizon? You asked that’s the thing, was it horrible and bad now? It’s 25 years old. So that shows but it was definitely a Hollywood blockbuster. We want you to buy lots of popcorn and see it.
And the theater, that’s what it was. It was every step of the way. But in the end it made it predictable. It got a little boring for me because it’s yeah, I know what’s going to happen. I know what they’re going to do. Oh, 30 seconds have gone by in the movie. You know what I mean? It was that it was very formulaic.
And being that old, the special effects did not hold up. So it jarred a little bit watching some of them. And like you mentioned with Europa report, how people wanted it, because it was so realistic. And this one is so unrealistic when you really think about it. So well, I’ve got notes for all of that.
So overall, overall, I really prefer our lower budget, lesser known movies. Most of the time this particular one, now I’m all for a big blockbuster fast and the furious. I want to see that blowing up in front of my face, all over the place. But yeah, some movies, not as much Armageddon. Now that’s the funny thing, because Armageddon came out about this same time and I really loved Armageddon and I still love Armageddon.
And you can’t say it’s like anything new, you knew what was going to happen in the movie. They’re going to save earth. And there’s
[00:06:46] Rhys: of scientifically
[00:06:46] Stephen: viable either. No, it’s not, but I think the difference is. This was trying to be Saifai like, but now we’re getting never tried to say, we’re not we’re we are an adventure action flake just sat in space.
They didn’t shy away from that. I think that’s the difference. If I know it’s an action, adventure flake, I’m okay. With all the suspension of disbelief through the whole thing. That’s the point of escape reality. This was Saifai trying to be, Saifai admit it. It probably would have worked a lot better as a star Trek episode.
[00:07:24] Rhys: Sure. In fact, there was basically a doctor who episode that was the exact
[00:07:28] Stephen: same thing, which is interesting because there’s a part we in the movie there is.
[00:07:32] Rhys: Yeah. Yeah. So this is a big budget, major Hollywood film. It was a UK us collaboration from 1997. It had a $60 million budget and it had a $52 million take.
So it missed it by that much at the time it was directed by Paul Anderson at the time, Kurt Russell told Paul Anderson to ignore how poorly the film didn’t theaters and Kurt Russell said, forget about what this movie is doing now in 15 years time, this is going to be the movie. You’re glad you made.
Now that being said, despite what you or I might think of it, this movie is a cult classic.
[00:08:15] Stephen: Oh yeah. It
[00:08:16] Rhys: definitely is a lot of people who love this film,
[00:08:21] Stephen: which is interesting. Yeah, because it’s interesting because there wasn’t anything in the plot that was super cool, unique and different. Every part of it was stolen from everything else that you’ve ever seen.
It was just rehashed from other stuff.
[00:08:37] Rhys: Yeah. And at that it’s still garnered three nominations for awards and one win at the Brussels international festival of fantasy
[00:08:46] Stephen: film. There was something to be said for familiarity. There
[00:08:49] Rhys: is. So as we go through this so this is a compare and contrast episode, the actual synopsis of event horizon and all that stuff that we usually do is going to be a lot briefer.
[00:09:02] Stephen: You can figure out the plot pretty easy. What you’re going to find is that you’ll see, as we go through this, why it ended up like it did. So it was written by a guy named Phil Eisner. The biggest thing on Phil Eisner. List was Firestarter too. So it’s not like he has a whole lot of high-end credits to his name when he was writing this.
[00:09:24] Rhys: And he said he wanted to write the shining in space.
[00:09:28] Stephen: Okay. At
[00:09:29] Rhys: least I can see that. Yeah. His original concept was to have a ship that was haunted and he wanted haunted by aliens of some sort because of the way that it traveled. He also for all you Uber nerds out there, he was a big Warhammer 40 K fan.
Wow. And this concept actually comes up in Warhammer 40 K, because when you travel, take your ship through these wormhole things to get from one point to the other, if your ship’s not properly shielded, these evil spirits will possess the people on board, your ship. And then you know, the people that are now.
Uber violent. They don’t listen to you. That kind of thing. I’ve never played war hammer, 40 K that’s just what I’ve came across. Watch researching this. It was directed by Paul Anderson. Now Paul Anderson has some credits to his name and I’m going to list them. And when you list them, think about what you were saying about how this is a big Hollywood blockbuster.
His first big hit, the one that actually got him, the permission to do this movie was he did mortal combat
[00:10:40] Stephen: the first movie first one way back. Wow. Okay.
[00:10:44] Rhys: Okay. He also did alien vs.
[00:10:46] Stephen: Predator. Oh wow. Okay.
[00:10:50] Rhys: Resident evil, resident, evil afterlife resident, evil retribution resident evil. The final
[00:10:56] Stephen: chapter. Okay.
So I can see a vet horizon fitting in within that bunch of
[00:11:03] Rhys: movie. Yeah, exactly. He turned down the X-Men to do this movie
[00:11:07] Stephen: because mortal Kombat, or even for both, I don’t know. I
[00:11:12] Rhys: don’t recall mortal combat being some massive blockbuster hit, but apparently
[00:11:17] Stephen: it was, oh yeah. The game people they, it’s still one of those, it’s a cult thing, but the new one was actually really good.
I liked the new one. And the success to that is why paramount came to him and said, do you want to do this? Now? This is a paramount production. So it had a whole lot of power behind it. The cast that turned this movie down included Arnold Schwartzenegger, Tommy Lee Jones, Bruce Willis, bill Pullman, Jeremy irons, and Amy Brennaman.
[00:11:48] Rhys: While all these people wanted to be. And all of them either past, because it’s something else going on or just didn’t want to be involved in it. Wow. So to give the guy a little more credits paramount wanted the one of this movie to come out. So they offered it to him. He agreed to do it. He didn’t like the idea of the ghosts in the ship.
He wanted it to be something more kind of demonic behind it. So he basically, and if you’re wondering the visit in this ship is the ship. And the visit in this movie is the ship of visits. Hell and. Paramount rushed the production because what they wanted was they wanted a blockbuster film to come out.
Before Titanic,
[00:12:34] Stephen: all politics
[00:12:37] Rhys: and Titanic was super delayed, so they needed something to fill that space. So he only had four weeks to edit the entire thing and he edited the whole thing. Working seven days a week. Over those four weeks, it only took 10 minutes start to finish for him to fit, to actually do all the filming and the post production.
[00:12:58] Stephen: It was filmed on. No, I was just going to say, now I will say if I had seen this 25 years ago, when I was younger and movies were different, I might’ve thought different about it. I will give it that much, but con concerning all the movies that have come in that 25 years, this one wasn’t as impressive to me.
[00:13:18] Rhys: He found a group of construction people who would be build the sets for this. They found a unit just outside of London and they use seven soundstages at once. So these guys came on and in four weeks built all the sets they needed to shoot this on seven sound stages. Oddly enough, the other half of that facility that they didn’t take up was taken up by eyes wide.
Wow. Okay. Very different films, depending on which side of the wall you’re
[00:13:50] Stephen: on. If you got really drunk the night before and wandered on the wrong set, you could be an eye opener there.
[00:13:58] Rhys: Yeah. The cast, I tried to pick out just people who had like notable stuff in their background, thinking it’d be one or two, but no, the casts Laurence Fishburne is in this and he’s got 129 credits.
He was in apocalypse now, mass trapper, John M D the color purple nightmare on Elm street, three Pee-wee’s Playhouse. I had no idea he was cowboy Curtis on people. He always played. I
[00:14:21] Stephen: don’t remember that
[00:14:22] Rhys: either boys in the hood, the matrix mission impossible for, he was the voice of the silver surfer in fantastic four rise of the silver surfer, John wick, two and three and Ant-Man and wasp.
Yes. And people love Laurence Fishburne, right? Yeah. Yeah. Sam Neil plays where he’s got 147 credits. Not quite as many that you’re going to know here in the states, the hunt for red October Jurassic park one and three, a that TV series Merlin. He was in Peaky blinders. He was in Thor, Ragnar rock.
And I love this. This is one of the things that I love about Thor, Ragnarok. There’s the scene where they’re doing the play about how awesome Loki is. And in that Loki is being played by oh, come on. The Bourne identity guy Matt Damon. And he’s not even credited right for it. And Sam Neil was playing Odin.
Yeah. They have these big name actors and they don’t even mention them in their credits.
[00:15:24] Stephen: You’re not even worthy.
[00:15:26] Rhys: He was also in the Peter rabbit movies and he’s been on Rick and Morty. So that Sam Neill, he plays weird. Catherine Quinland plays Peter. She’s been in 105 credits, including American graffiti.
And I never promised you a rose garden, independence day. She was in the doors that made the list. Cause I’ve just been watching that lately, Apollo 13 she was in the remake of the Hills, have eyes from 2006 to go along with horror. And she was also in horns, which if you haven’t seen, that’s an interesting little
[00:15:58] Stephen: and speaking of the movie antlers just came out.
You’d probably enjoy it. If you haven’t seen it.
[00:16:03] Rhys: I have not
[00:16:03] Stephen: yet. It was actually pretty
[00:16:05] Rhys: good. Jason Isaacs plays DJ he’s got 49 credits, including army. The Patriot black Hawk down resident evil he’s Lucius Malfoy from the Harry Potter movies. Indian recognize. Oh yeah,
I know. When I made that connection, he was in Electra.
He was in, he does a voice in avatar. The last year bender he’s had enrolled Sal. He was also in fury star wars, rebels, and Castlevania. He does a lot of voiceover work. Apparently Shawn per Smith, he was in 120 credits. You’re not going to know any of them, except the young Indiana Jones Chronicles in the walking dead.
But he gets mentioned because he’s John Pertwee son and John Pertwee and the second doctor who. Yeah, you got to give him props
[00:16:48] Stephen: just for that. I did recognize him. So it might’ve been from young indeed, but there might be something else on the list that I’ve seen a man, because I did recognize his face.
[00:16:57] Rhys: In my notes, when he actually comes on and speaks, I’m like, oh, my Kati sounds just like his dad.
Right? There you go. Peter Marin occur plays co-pack he’s got 130 credits, including flash Gordon, labyrinth, young Indiana Jones Chronicles. Again, judge Dredd did the voiceover for one of the doors in the Witcher one in three. And he did voiceover in dark souls, one and two. So he’s big into the video games.
The original movie was 130 minutes. Okay. Let that sink in for a minute. That’s two hours and 10
[00:17:30] Stephen: minutes. Yeah. Yeah. Which unseen odd nowadays, back then it was such a big deal. Yeah. Two
[00:17:38] Rhys: years later, the original was 96 minutes and the cult fans of this movie would love to see the director’s cut, but they’re out of luck because all of the footage was stored somewhere.
All of the masters were stored somewhere, not unlike Dr. Hu. This one’s from the sixties and it destroyed the net masters. It’s been rumored. There’s a, director’s cut DVD out there that somebody had. But it’s only video quality and Anderson hasn’t gotten a hold of it yet. So whether or not they try and do something with that
[00:18:13] Stephen: who knows.
I would actually be interested in going back and seeing a two hour and 10 minute version of this movie. Just seeing if it changes it.
[00:18:24] Rhys: Oh yeah. Because the original director’s cut was NC seven. Oh, okay. It did not. It didn’t make it, it went over the line.
[00:18:35] Stephen: This was close in a few spots.
[00:18:39] Rhys: The movie was an inspiration to dead space.
The video game and doom three, both of those games, the developers have come out and said this movie was a big inspiration. And in fact, ironically in the very opening shot, Sam. Neil is there and his blinds go up and there’s the sound with the blinds go up. And the sound is, was taken from the door’s opening from the original doom movie
[00:19:02] Stephen: game.
Yeah I saw that and I even said this movie, the story could be the prequel to the doom game. And I didn’t know that. And I said that, and then I also said, but it also sounds like they mashed it with Hellraiser because by the end, there’s a lot of Hellraiser in it too.
[00:19:21] Rhys: Ironically, ironic you say that because Clive Barker actually
[00:19:25] Stephen: worked on this film.
Oh,
[00:19:27] Rhys: crazy. When they were developing this. They claimed that the film seemed cursed. The space suits were 65 pounds. So inflexible the staff the actors couldn’t actually sit down while they were wearing them. And there would be days where they would be in them all day long. So they had this like hoist type thing that would come in and they’d hook you in it.
So you wouldn’t actually have to be standing there the whole time, but they would have back problems when they were done shooting this. If you ever hear any of the actors talk about this, none of them speak about it in a good manner. They’re not critiquing the story or anything like that.
They’re just always yeah, we wouldn’t want to do that again. The shot where there’s the fire and the guy comes out of the fire that actually caught the soundstage on fire.
And in one of the scenes the special effects went off. There was an explosion and Sam Neil was too close and it knocked him down and knocked him unconscious. Oh, geez.
[00:20:21] Stephen: So yeah yeah. Yeah. So the movie opens up, they start off with a timeline right off the bat, which is a mistake for scifi movies, because they say we’ll have people on the moon by 2015.
[00:20:38] Rhys: That’s gone. It says, where is our moon base in my notes?
Yeah they’re off by probably 10, 15 years 2025 was NASA’s idea for putting people back to the moon with having something developed over the next five years from that span. Commercial mining, they say happened in to 2032.
I don’t know if that would ever happen. Earthlings are very protective of the moon. And then they have the development of work drive based spacecraft by 2040, which. Yeah, we’re on the point of almost going back to the mood and we’re nowhere near having dry basis. The base, of course, they had the craft.
Do they spin it out? It disappeared for seven years and then suddenly shows
[00:21:31] Stephen: back up. Yeah, the science in this I’m going, oh my God, get, they do something new and different.
[00:21:39] Rhys: Yeah. If you talk about warp drive T kind of technology in Saifai, you usually have three different kinds of concepts. I wrote this same stuff down.
[00:21:49] Stephen: I know exactly what I was write down for the notes.
[00:21:53] Rhys: You’ve got people who completely ignore the speed of light and just say, we’ve got a ship that goes really
[00:21:59] Stephen: fast, like star wars star wars had hyperdrive. Yes, they did. They
[00:22:03] Rhys: did. And technically hyperdrive, you’re entering into kind of a sub dimensional pocket that you’re moving through and then you’re popping back out of it, which is very similar to the concept of what they have
[00:22:17] Stephen: here.
Yes. It’s the same concept that a Stargate used and lots of others. And. Getting on that. I’m all for a good story that doesn’t belabor all the science, not everybody wants a documentary in their movie and I’m good with that. I just got to laugh because if this story had been written in 1950s, I probably would have thought better of it because then it was cool to think of those things.
But when it’s almost 2000 and that’s what they’re still okay and going back to the whole techie thing, star Trek had a lot of science people involved with it in the physics behind star Trek. When they’re traveling at warp speeds, they’re actually developing a bubble around that protects the ship as it goes into high end speeds.
[00:23:05] Rhys: And so they’re like the third form of work travel. They’re not actually going to a different dimension. They’re basically building a little pocket for themselves to break those rules. But they actually do have the wormhole concepts when they do deep space nine. So they have both of them
[00:23:25] Stephen: in that one.
Yeah. Cause they’re right on the edge of that wormhole and Voyager gets sucked up into the wormhole, into the whatever quadrant they went to.
[00:23:35] Rhys: After they had their little timeline, they cut to this scene of stuff floating around on board, the event horizon. And the debris that’s floating around was supposed to have a lot of nastier stuff in it. They’re supposed to be like a bloody tooth and like dismembered fingers, that kind of thing, floating around amidst all the other things.
That stuff got cut. There was a really interesting thing that happened because of the time that was happening. They had an entire second location with other people filming specifically for that whole video log orgiastic scene. A lot of the stuff they shot at the second site Anderson wasn’t there for it.
They cut all that stuff because they did things like bring in amputees and porn stars for like the whole blood soaked orgy scenes. When they did the initial showing people were like, yeah, no, that’s a little too far. That’s why all of that stuff got cut out. And then they that John Malcovich movie that is the shadow of the vampire or something where it’s like the documentary of Nosferatu and that it was real vampire fictionalize.
[00:24:59] Stephen: Yeah. Somebody needs to make the movie, that’s the making of event horizon with some of this stuff it could be a scifi comedy. It’s just, that sounds wonderful. I love that. Yeah.
[00:25:14] Rhys: All right. Bring in the amputees and the porn stars.
Sam. There’s this shot right after that, a Sam nail waking up after having this bad dream or this dream of his wife, who we get the idea she’s no longer around and then it pans back. And he’s actually on this orbital thing above the space above earth, that opening scene lasts for 45 seconds and it took a third of their entire special effects budget.
Whoa. Yeah, I really got the producers in this. I really got a question. Some of their
[00:25:43] Stephen: judgment. Exactly. Right away that opening sequence that went on, I’m like, okay, so either a he has mental health issues. So we’re going to question everything that happens throughout the movie, like those types of horror movies do or B he’s actually got some connection with this event, horizon that left and that there’s some other worldly thing going on, blah, blah, blah.
I was leaning toward the mental health thing. That just seems like it is. And it’s still arguably could be part of it too. But if it was exactly it was it, was he mentally unstable or was it caused because of the event horizon being breached?
[00:26:23] Rhys: Yeah. There’s this whole thing because they were so rushed.
Anderson actually went to the actors and said, Hey, I want your input on this. Come up with your characters backstories. Wow. So they got to come up with their own backstories. One of the big things they came up with were the flags, which is really odd to me. They tried to think about what the future of earth with the flags representing the future of earth would look like.
So for instance, Sam Neill he was supposed to be Australian. And so instead of having these standard Australian flag He actually went through and did a thing that honored Aborigines and incorporated the two together. So the flag of Australia that he has on his uniform is not the actual flag of Australia.
And they like carried that idea over, into all the flags that show up in this thing.
[00:27:10] Stephen: I love that the little details sometimes are the coolest parts. You learn, stuff like that, but there’s other parts of the movie. They might’ve spent a little more time on that.
[00:27:21] Rhys: Oh sure. And even the writing. Okay. So like for instance I on drives are an actual thing.
We have them. And they’re crazy fast. I in fact, went through and made a chart of all of the local because. Where I work, I have access to like how fast they really are. So I made a chart of how long it would actually take you to get to everything in the solar system. If you had an eye on drive humming at full speed and you could get to the moon in 15 minutes and the travel times are just cut drastically, but they take for ever to accelerate.
They’re so slow going. And the other downside is there’s no way to slow down, they can speed up and almost infinite amount, but you can’t really slow him
[00:28:08] Stephen: down. We missed that last galaxy. Let’s try for the next four kids stop fighting, or I’m turning this I on drive around. Yeah,
[00:28:19] Rhys: here they’ve got one and not only.
Can they slow it down. It can accelerate so fast. You’re going to experience what they say. 90
[00:28:26] Stephen: GS. Yeah, it was you’ll turn the jelly liquid by jelly and being in a bucket of water will help. Yeah. That’s right. So did the guy who did the Daredevil movie think of that
[00:28:40] Rhys: Sanford Chewy’s character mentions why do we have to get me going all the way out to Uranus?
We could go to Mars. At least Mars has women. And I’m thinking again, look at your timeline guides, because if we’ve just barely set up something on the moon, we’re definitely don’t have people hanging out on Mars yet. That’s not actually Laurence Fishburne though. However, does a great job playing this hard-ass commander, which two years later.
He was in the matrix. It was just like the step up for that. Cause if you look at him like an apocalypse now he’s this young kid he’s on the gun. He’s not paying attention to anything. He’s just having a good time. And then you look at him in the matrix and it’s completely different person.
And it’s cool to see that
[00:29:26] Stephen: evolution. I remember him in diehard three he was almost the slapstick comedy aspect, yeah. We are here as a voice in his head and he sees his dead wife with her eyes gouged out and it’s cause he woke up first when the ship gets to the event horizon and then it turns out no, it was just a hallucination.
[00:29:47] Rhys: Back to Steve’s thing is that he’s just crazy to start with or was it the ship reaching out to
[00:29:52] Stephen: him and to bring up Europa report? Again, all these things we were talking about, it’s a fun Saifai movie, as opposed to an accurate scifi movie, a big difference. And this one really went with the common tropes in Hollywood of jump scares and stuff like that.
The other one totally did.
[00:30:14] Rhys: Yeah, I have in here in the notes. Spew forth a whole bunch of Saifai jargon and then move on from there because that’s really what this is. The whole crew gets together and they have this debrief and it’s really just this exp excuse for all kinds of exposition to explain stuff.
So first they have introductions to everybody and the characters are so stereotypical their introductions are like, yeah, I’m the guy who you’re going to hate. You’re going to love. And all this stuff and okay, we get it. You’re the party guy that’s fine. And then you have the scientist who says something and then Laurence Fishburne comes back with a super hard-ass response and okay, what’s the we’re setting the craft and up is this no nonsense harvest.
And then the scientist’s explanation, which is a whole bunch of scifi gobbledygook, which means nothing. And it doesn’t mean anything to them even, but basically it’s yeah, we. Go through this other dimension to get somewhere else here real
[00:31:14] Stephen: fast. If you’ve seen any other Saifai movies dealing with this type of thing, you understand that move on
[00:31:21] Rhys: 35 days before this movie came out, contact came out and it does the exact same kind of drive
[00:31:26] Stephen: capability.
Ah, interesting. But was written 30 years prior. Yeah. 40 hands up like that. Yeah.
[00:31:35] Rhys: And interstellar comes out 17, 17 years later, the exact kind of a drive capacity. So the ship they’re in is the Lewis and Clark and it is going to dock at the event horizon at the main airlock they say, which happens to be air lock, number 13.
Oh, why is the 13th air lock? The main air lock? That makes no
[00:31:55] Stephen: sense. I love also they, when they go to dock, it’s not a load bearing structure. What were the Hills? Are you supposed to dock then? What was the plan?
[00:32:06] Rhys: Yeah, that’s supposedly, and I didn’t see it. I looked, I did look, I didn’t see it.
Supposedly the model of the event horizon, actually one of the antenna arrays. That’s there’s bunches of them that stick up off of there is actually an X wing. Damn. Now I gotta go look at that scene again. I didn’t see it, but apparently
[00:32:26] Stephen: it’s in there. Sorry. When Abrams did the star wars force awakens, he put the Batmobile on the underside of the Falcon.
[00:32:34] Rhys: Nice. Nice. When they actually get into the bill into the ship and there’s stuff floating around, one of the things floating around in the back round is a VHS tape,
Okay. We have the
capacity to get all the way to alpha Proxima, but we still are using
[00:32:49] Stephen: VHS tapes. Wow. Oh, come on. Twilight zone, star Trek, go watch some of those episodes. They were
[00:32:56] Rhys: so into trying to make this feel real for the cast that they put magnets on the bottom of their boots. So when they were doing the magnetic things, they actually did have to peel their foot up.
That’s
[00:33:08] Stephen: calm. Yeah.
[00:33:10] Rhys: Yeah. So those are doing all these realistic things, trying to make it as realistic as possible. So why did all the ships make noise when they were flying through space? Another thing you wrote a report didn’t do
right.
Laurence Fishburne has aligned when he steps in and he’s this place is a tomb and it’s it’s been gone for seven years. So anybody who’s there is probably dead. And it was really weird. Cause he said, there’s this jump scare. Cause he’s there in this hand, white comes up. He just like brushes it away.
And it’s if that’s a severed hand in a glove, shouldn’t that alarm you. Yeah. Yeah. So we head down to engineering. There’s this great big tunnel. They call it the meat grinder. Have you ever tried to walk through one of those coasts? I
[00:33:59] Stephen: used to have one. Yeah. There’s a couple of places
[00:34:02] Rhys: to like you just keep pointing to lead.
[00:34:06] Stephen: It really does mess with you more than you would think.
[00:34:10] Rhys: The doors are all
[00:34:10] Stephen: spiky in zero gravity. Let’s put big spikes on the wall. I was like, what the heck is that for other than it looks cool in a horror movie,
[00:34:22] Rhys: the original strive was supposed to be this big, smooth black liquidy. Okay, but Anderson decided to change it in a nod to hell raiser.
There you go. And so that’s why it looks the way it did. And like I said, Clive Barker was actually consulted on the production during the setup for the whole thing, the architecture for the ship, when they mapped it all out, it was modeled after Notre Dame.
[00:34:46] Stephen: Wow. Be pre burning. Yeah. Yeah.
Pre fire. So my question though is maybe the science really supports this to achieve some sort of wormhole faster than light travel. Do you really have to have a gyroscope because there’s a million other movies and stories where it’s always a gyroscope drive? Always.
[00:35:12] Rhys: Yeah. I don’t know. The whole concept of the gyroscope is really fascinating just because once you’re actually in Sera, J’s gyroscope always stays upright.
Anyways, it keeps its orientation. So it doesn’t seem to be affected because it’s creating its own gravity. And I think just that whole idea, everybody seems to like playing with it for
[00:35:30] Stephen: some reason it’d be even the event horizon with the circle. I’m like the star gate did that also.
Yeah. I think star gate. No Stargate was before this, so again, every, all of this felt rehashed from many other things.
[00:35:46] Rhys: Yeah. And it really is. It’s one of those kinds of things like, so that one guys in engineering, DJs and engineering and the thing lines up and the portal opens and there’s like this liquid stuff sitting there and he sticks his hand in it.
What kind of moron? Oh, I wonder what this stuff is. And he just sticks his hand in, and then there’s this massive power surge everything’s on fire. And the Lewis and Clark is like in all bad shape and
[00:36:12] Stephen: everything. Of course. It had to be, they had to somehow lose their way home easily.
[00:36:18] Rhys: The kid from engineering he’s catatonic, the one guy says he saw something and where it’s like defensive right off the bat about Hey, don’t mess with this.
They’re strange noises in the sick bay and the one lady goes over and there’s her son in the tent with all kinds of lesions on his legs. So that’s the concept behind, behind the thing is that you, this portal opens up, you go somewhere near to hell and something came back on board the ship, and it can read your mind and screw with your head so that you were seeing horrible
[00:36:58] Stephen: things.
All right. So hell really his signature now with the sinner bites. Not yet. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:37:07] Rhys: And the funny thing is how many times people figure this out throughout the movie? Yeah. Like stark figures it out right off the bat and nobody’s listening. Eventually the captain figures it out. Nobody’s by then it’s too late. People are already like injured or dead.
[00:37:27] Stephen: And I think that’s where it starts.
I honestly that whole part of it with them not figuring it out and not listening, but that was a lot less realistic to me that, and even the noises of ships and space and some of the other things, just because it’s come on and again 97 was a different era in movies, but it was just like, come on it’s it’s doing it just to drag it out.
[00:37:56] Rhys: So I started to think about that. I was like, yeah, this was done in 97, but then I thought there were good movies that came out around
[00:38:05] Stephen: that
[00:38:05] Rhys: time, even good seven. Yeah, an amazing movie and amazing horror movie for you to watch. And it doesn’t feel over the top or there’s not like plot holes for you to fall into just to keep the movie moving
[00:38:23] Stephen: forward.
You know what I mean? Yeah. And contrast it with Europa report that it never felt like it was contriving anything just to move the story. They, it seemed to go in a very logical pace of how they figured things out and did things at least from a movie watcher viewpoint.
[00:38:42] Rhys: So now let’s start to compare the two movies. We could go through and scene by scene with event horizon. But. We don’t really need to. Everybody starts dying. Things, keep blowing up and bad things happen and go watch a hell raiser and play doom. And you’ll put it all together.
Captain sacrifices himself to save everybody else,
[00:39:06] Stephen: which okay. If we’re going to talk realism, whose idea was it to take this massive football length or longer shift? Put explosives on the very long metal bridge. So it separates the two parts. So you have so much debris flying around the chances of any ship surviving and getting away are not.
[00:39:28] Rhys: Yeah, we don’t have any better way to uncouple the front with the back other than blow stuff up. That’s exactly what
[00:39:34] Stephen: I said. This is the same thing I said, there’s no better way to do this. I’m watching this going. That would destroy whatever ship was in front, whether their ship was docked, it would just everything.
So much debris would be flying around.
[00:39:46] Rhys: Yeah. The other thing that I really think is funny is that they blow it up and they’re like in the upper atmosphere sphere of, was it your anus? Yeah. It was your anus for atmosphere and they blow it up and the drive side gets pulled down, but the top side.
Doesn’t unlike gets to escape that massive gravity. I’m not exactly sure how that works. The only thing I took there was that the law back half had that connection to hell and hell was reaching out and sucking it back down. That’s the only thing I could use to explain that also. Hell is very heavy.
[00:40:34] Stephen: So
[00:40:35] Rhys: the heavy part of it falls back to the planet. Yeah.
[00:40:40] Stephen: And how much atmosphere does Uranus really have? Cause that looked like a lot of clouds there.
[00:40:47] Rhys: Oh, it’s nothing by gas. It’s a giant guess giant.
[00:40:51] Stephen: Really. Wasn’t trying to knew it was, but I didn’t know how much it really had in the floating around.
[00:40:59] Rhys: Yeah. You don’t get to anything that’s even vaguely solid until. Past crushing depth. So to compare the two movies they both start with me and they both have five syllables in their name.
[00:41:13] Stephen: We’re going deep, really deep
[00:41:16] Rhys: event or horizon Europa report,
[00:41:21] Stephen: probably on purpose. I’m. Sure. So between the two, I think the biggest difference between the two is that you have event horizon, which was a big studio film that was written to be a horror story set in space.
[00:41:41] Rhys: And with Europa report, you have a small, independent film that was written to explore some horror themes. But it was much more about the space travel than it was the actual horror story.
[00:42:00] Stephen: Yeah. I agree with that.
[00:42:02] Rhys: And so I went in and I started researching, actually started finding interviews with Phillip glass and Sebastian Codero and go at wrote your Roper report and Codero directed it.
And between the two the I’m sorry, it’s Gillette. It’s not Gladys Gillette between the two, Phillip Gillette actually spoke more about the story and how it was built Cordero was talking much more about the actual movie itself. For instance, one of the things that he said was that he wanted an international cast and he wanted good actors, but not necessarily big stars.
And if you contrast that with event horizon, they went through. Big names, not as big as they were even aiming for. And I’m not saying that those actors aren’t good, but then the seat filling capacity capability of them was far more important to Anderson then how well that. Actor actually fit
[00:43:10] Stephen: the role.
Yeah. I can see that. And that’s one of the nice things about you could argue one of the nice things about a smaller budget and a lesser known actors, because a lot of times whoever you get is going to be happy to get the gig. And a lot of times they may even work harder for it. Yeah. Look at when he did attack the block, he was fantastic.
And then he went on to be in star wars and we said the same thing about attack the block, how the lesser known cast allowed us to enjoy the movie better than seeing all these actor, oh, look, you should be chasing dinosaurs. And shouldn’t he be fighting Kung Fu with counter re and the worst thing would have been if they got Tom cruise for the movie, you know that
[00:43:52] Rhys: Some of the other things like gelatin Cordera when Juliet was writing it and Cordelia was directly. Europa report. They like did serious research. Both the guys went to JPL to talk to the people there. And in fact, Codero interviewed one of the astronauts who did the repair on Hubble.
Oh cool. And while he was doing the repair, his glove got ripped. And so that whole scene where they’re out in space and the guy, his suit gets ripped, they actually talk to an astronaut where, Hey, that actually happened to him. How do you react with that?
[00:44:31] Stephen: So pure panic don’t care. How much trading you got?
There’s some panic in that. I am so high above the earth. I see each edge of the planet and I’m losing my only air source.
[00:44:46] Rhys: Yeah. Gillette went to JPL and interviewed the scientists. And he said something in the interview. He was in I’m paraphrasing here, but I’ve come across the same thing.
When I was in college talking to scientists, they are S they can be some of the most for lack of a better word, stupid, smart people you’ll ever meet because they’re into their science. And that’s the only thing that’s important to him. He went and he interviewed the scientists and he said, if we had the capabilities for a one way trip to Europa, would you go?
And they were all like absolutely. We would be there. And I’m like, wow I don’t see myself making
[00:45:34] Stephen: that sacrifice. I’ll look at the pictures. They said that’s
[00:45:38] Rhys: nice. Yes, absolutely. So they did a lot of research to this. Since be fair to Anderson and Eisner. I don’t think they had time to do research was pushing
[00:45:50] Stephen: this.
And honestly, that wasn’t really the goal from the storytelling. I think it’d be the best excuse ever. Yeah. I’m writing a book about really fast race cars. Let’s go drive some that’d be my excuse all the freaking time. But they their goal was totally different than your open report.
You, you don’t necessarily have to have every bit of the science down. Perfect. You don’t have to show everything on the screen. Completely realistic. That’s not why people are going to a big blockbuster popcorn. Yeah. And it would really ruin that type of movie to actually,
[00:46:25] Rhys: and I think event horizon Eisner set off to do the shining in space.
And what he ended up with was hell
[00:46:32] Stephen: raiser in space. It did have shining aspects
[00:46:35] Rhys: a little bit where you have the ghosts of people like running around and you’re chasing them and it leads you to a bad end kind of deal. But it did it, it did have the psychological stuff behind it, but it also really drove itself on the horror and the gore.
Again, it was like a horror movie that just so happened to be in space, and that’s
[00:46:58] Stephen: exactly the differences. It was a big blockbuster sci-fi ish horror ish put together a few influences on other things. Whereas you wrote a report, they wanted to do something very Saifai no, not even. Saifai very techie sciency.
And the crew itself, wasn’t going out to be horror. They were really trying to make it look like really going to visit and the way they use the found footage in that one to give the horror aspects, it worked well. They didn’t go over the top with any of it. Yeah. Yes, they
[00:47:33] Rhys: didn’t.
Now. Now here’s where we’re going to talk about Europa report. In a little different light than we did when it originally aired. The interview that I found with July and I wish I remembered, so I could properly cite my source. And I’m sorry, guys, if you ever come across this, then I’m not giving you a plug, but it was a group of authors and editors who had a podcasts.
And they were fans of Lovecraft and they had Gillette there as a. As like a special guests to interview him and Gillette is the big Lovecraft
[00:48:12] Stephen: fan, which totally makes sense. In that movies perspective,
[00:48:17] Rhys: when he was writing Europa report, he, his concept was what if you had people who faced the big, giant emptiness of cosmic horror, but they didn’t lose their minds.
They actually could keep their shit together through the entire experience. And so when he wrote Europa report, that was the angle he was coming at and it happens In two different locations in the movie. At one point in time, you had the junior engineer who is looking at the vastness of space, and that is going to be his home for the next two hours before he just finally dies.
Which I mean, if that’s not horrifying, I’m not exactly
[00:48:59] Stephen: sure what it is.
[00:49:02] Rhys: And then you had the end where you have we’re on an alien planet. There’s some alien life that is coming after us. We have absolutely no hope of getting off of here. Not unlike the kind of thing that you would run into if you’re reading a Lovecraft
[00:49:17] Stephen: in stories.
Yeah. Now that you say that, I totally can see that if Lovecraft wrote Saifai in the fifties Europa report would probably be pretty, right? Yeah.
[00:49:28] Rhys: Yeah. He was big on they head somewhere dangerous, discover some new, exciting information. Nobody give their lives in an effort to get them for information back to the rest of us.
If you ask him about how he would classify Europa report, he says it’s a cross between love crafty and horror and hard science
[00:49:54] Stephen: fiction. Ah now that you say that, that endears that to me even more, because I totally see it now I did pick up, but yeah, absolutely. And on the one hand event horizon it was an important film because it did go on to have further influences.
[00:50:13] Rhys: And it wasn’t an important film. That’s the problem it sits like in the middle. When you take a look at Buffy, the vampire Slayer, the movie. It was an important film because it went on to basically define an entire new genre of television serials. But the movie was ridiculous. And over the top,
[00:50:35] Stephen: yes, they loved about it.
[00:50:39] Rhys: They knew it when they shot it and they embraced it. Event horizon was a big and it redefined that whole space, horror concepts. It was no longer about like aliens. It was something far more diabolical behind. It. It wasn’t just if you watch alien a good movie you basically have this entity that smart.
And it’s you against it. And it’s just doing what it does, event horizon entered into no there’s evil in space. And that really took over a lot between, especially in video games, you can see it a lot in video games with doom in that stuff
[00:51:26] Stephen: and like Bates space. But they didn’t embrace it.
[00:51:30] Rhys: They still seemed like they were trying. Do a serious movie. And I think that’s
[00:51:36] Stephen: where it misses. I agree. And what you were saying about from the historical aspect and how it’s, where it started some of that that’s very true. And that, that gives it an enough credit worthiness for some respect and all that, regardless of movie, since then have done a lot of those things better, but that’s how it always is.
The first one isn’t going to hold up compared to the guys that come after it necessarily, but I can definitely see that because I mentioned Armageddon, Armageddon is an action flag. It’s just set in space and ID for another one where there could be a whole lot of bad science in that, but nobody really cared it wasn’t white people.
[00:52:21] Rhys: On the one hand it’s, I hate this whole concept of rebooting stuff, which in our society is in, because nobody wants to finance anything unless they know it’s going to be a big winner. On the other hand, I would love to see what would happen if you took event horizon and you like redid it and you gave people time and you gave people enough advisors to be like, it’s not just a horror movie, it’s a scifi movie.
And if it was redone even with a smaller budget, I think it would, it could, it had potential to work really well.
Yeah.
[00:53:06] Stephen: I could see that. I could see someone doing a really good reboot of this doing well. That’d be interesting, but the one other comment that made me choose. Was the whole video they got with all the it’s, all that going on.
That was some absolutely fantastic filters to clean it up that much. I thought wow. So I don’t know what this says about me, but if you’ve watched enough horror movies you’ll get to these scenes in movies, like event horizon, where they just do these pile on quick cuts of horrible things. And I would like to slow them down so I can actually see what’s in there.
[00:53:51] Rhys: And this movie is great for that. If you really like just ignoring the movie, if you’re just looking for the visuals, there are lots of times where they just pile on these quick takes and you sit there and you can pause it from frame to frame. And there’s a lot of. Striking imagery that they just throw in there that flies by a third of a second.
And it’s the art school in me where you really want to appreciate the shot. Somebody went to the work of, and in the closing spot, like there’s this shot of this woman on a cross type thing with Barb wire. And like her face is somehow mutilated and it pans back and it’s panning back through a corpse.
That’s hanging in front of her and you’re seeing it through a hole in someone’s body and it’s. That was a hell of a lot of work for something that went by so fast. You really couldn’t recognize
[00:54:56] Stephen: what was there. And I think for those types of things, the big, fast collage like that, they really have to get super detailed and make them super fantastic.
So they stick out because they know it’s only going to be shown for a fraction. It’s enough to put you on edge and unnerve you, but not because if you study it, it’s all the monsters, like we said, with the tech, the block, how great the monsters look, but we also didn’t see them close up, slow motion in 20 million different scenes.
It’s little bits here and there. And that’s almost always been the best horror movies even to this day because it loses some of that horrific aspect. If it’s on the screen too long books are different. And that was one of the things that, cause when that last big flash went up, I slowed down those things and started looking through it and looking at these shots of what the hell that was like this is what Dr.
[00:55:49] Rhys: Weir, where the devil is showing to the captain and he’s this is tell, and he’s showing him these shots and I’m like, oh my gosh, half of these shots are people who are still alive in the front part of the ship. And I never made that connection when I saw it before. Cause it happened so fast.
And then the captain says something and he’s those people are still alive and the devil like laughs it off. Ha. They won’t be for long that kind of thing. But it’s much more impactful when you’re like, oh, he just showed him all kinds of horrific things about these people, but it’s not actually happening to him.
He’s like showing them his intent, yeah. The future or you must start talking to in an alternate dimension is happening.
It is. Yes. It’s, Schrodinger’s cat it’s happening
[00:56:38] Stephen: and it’s not all at the same Schroeder games devil.
[00:56:42] Rhys: Yeah. The court Darrow when he directed Europa report because he wanted the whole thing to feel like.
These people are in this ship. He put the actors on set and then sealed this chip set. So they were actually in there with just each other and the cameras were all fixed, cause it’s like that footage type thing. So he would just give them directly. Via Intercom. So the entire time they were shooting, they were actually in there like living together as a group of people.
And it’s that kind of immersion. I think that I don’t want to say that you’re event horizon. Immersion field. When stuff catches fire, because it’s on fire and explosions, knockout, your actors, it’s pretty immersed, but it’s a very different feel than like actually being sealed into a space for an
[00:57:39] Stephen: extended period of time.
It’s a really bring that feeling to Europe report. They should have sealed it and suspended it. Okay. We’ll be back to my orgonite everybody, if you stay in the gap. So we’ll let you know when we’re filming. They had one of the actresses in the interview with Cordeira. She was there and they were talking about the zero G thing.
[00:57:58] Rhys: A lot of it, they would put people on wire, but they would also put them on yoga balls that they had painted green screen color. So they’d be like sitting on the yoga balls and then to help them. They had people who were in more suits, completely green, more suits who like hold their leg and stuff like that.
When it was in a position that they couldn’t actually do in gravity. So there were like these more suit, invisible people like running
[00:58:24] Stephen: around, that’s horrific itself. What if there are like shadow people running around, but we have a green-screen filter in our site so they can stay hidden from, that’s actually a pretty good idea for a story.
[00:58:39] Rhys: If that’s the case, then I wish that would stop things like my cat knocking my drink over on my desk and stuff like that.
[00:58:45] Stephen: Maybe they scan,
[00:58:46] Rhys: do
[00:58:46] Stephen: something. Cool. All right. Hey, there’s a event horizon.
Wait, I do have one more day. I looked over at my notes. So when Justin was in the airlock they had the alarms and stuff going off and he came back to normal. So I’m thinking, oh, they’re going to use like the bells, like with venom and get rid of this thing. They’re gonna fight back for it.
And that never came up again. So I thought, okay writers, that was dumb to put that in. Other than now you get to see Justin almost die. That’s horrific, but why the hell is this on a delay? But it starts leaking air before it actually opens because he started decompressing and stuff for 15 seconds.
It’s like slow in groups.
[00:59:34] Rhys: There’s two or three spots in here where I’m like, decompression doesn’t work that way as we’ve discussed. That’s not how
[00:59:42] Stephen: this works. What’s pur we say, oh, if he goes out there, let’s go turn them inside out. Really?
[00:59:48] Rhys: No, not really. Yeah. We just got blood running from his eyes and his veins all bulging out and it’s wow,
I don’t everything I have heard.
That’s not
[01:00:00] Stephen: really how this happens. Okay. We got it. Yeah, there you go. Cool. All right. So those will be a bonus episode. We’ll get on our schedule. Like we were talking about, get it out soon and then we’ll get on the season three. What? Season three? I forget.
[01:00:17] Rhys: Season three. All of the horror movies are based on culture clashes.
Ooh. And that being said, it might not come as a surprise every season. So far, we’ve had some lighter heart lighthearted type of horror movies. You will not have those in season
[01:00:33] Stephen: three, no comedy with culture clashes.
[01:00:37] Rhys: No, not so much. People tend to take this stuff
[01:00:39] Stephen: pretty serious. If we have a good zombie werewolf vampire movie that could have had yeah.
Wow. Just by your reaction. I know where that’s going, okay.
All right. We’ll look forward to that and we’ll start getting them out. Yep. Cool. Later, man, take it
[01:00:58] Rhys: easy.
