Headscratchers / Event Horizon

• When Weir came under the influence of the entity possessing the Event Horizon, is it him succumbing to insanity? Or is it the Event Horizon itself possessing him and speaking through him?
  • We'll never know for sure, but the novelization implies that the real Weir is dead, and an entity from Hell is using his form and voice. In the final fight, the entity spits and says that Weir (in the third person) was weak.
  • Likewise, is Justin merely acting deranged from his exposure to the other realm? Or did the entity possessing the ship temporarily possess him and speak through him? His stunned reaction when he discovers himself in the air lock suggests the latter.
    • It is possible that possessing Justin only to doom him in the airlock is another way for the ship to torture its victims: not only does it get to kill one of the crew members horribly, but also destroys the morale of the rest, along with the exhaustion brought upon by the effort spent in trying to save him.
• In the final scene of the film, is Starck merely having a nightmare? Is she experiencing an anxiety attack due to the trauma she just experienced? Or are the remains of the Event Horizon still possessed and tormenting her?
  • The ambiguous nature of that is probably the point.
  • Related to this, however, is the fact that in her "nightmare" she sees Weir as he looked after the ship brought him back... something SHE DIDN'T KNOW...
    • Although this part apparently had more ambiguity in the original cut: part of one cut scene has the scar-covered Weir crawling down after Starck and Cooper after Starck is flushed down the ladder by the blood tidal wave.
  • I see no reason it couldn't be all three. That damned ship is evil as hell.
  • The way the spiked doors ominously close on the survivors and the rescue crew at the end seem to imply that the remains of the Event Horizon are still possessed and functioning.
  • On the other hand, Weir has a nightmare as he's coming out of stasis earlier in the movie, and it's implied that it's not an uncommon occurrence. Starck may simply have been having an extra-strength nightmare due to... well, the Event Horizon itself being terror incarnate.
• So why is this a Warhammer 40k movie? Might it be possible that the creators never heard of Warhammer?
  • Event Horizon is not related to the Warhammer 40000 universe at all. It's just a joke that 40k fans like to tell due to similarities. Ship makes a Warpjump... uh, I mean experimental FTL jump, which causes the ship to fly into the Warp... uh, I mean Hell, and makes the crew fall to Chaos... uh, I mean go utterly batshit, and then the ship gets possessed by daemons... uh, I mean generally becomes this weird sentient place that drives everyone mad, and then Weir gets possessed by a daemon... uh, I mean, well you know.
    • It's not just the mechanical function of things; that alone is enough to make the Doom connection, since Doom is very light on plot, but not 40k, since 40k has a lot more to dive through than "mechanics of FTL travel." What sells the idea is the fact that, beyond that, the film has an extremely similar design aesthetic to 40k; the note on the YMMV page that it wouldn't be hard to fool a 40k fan who's never seen or heard of the movie into thinking it's intended to be 40k isn't much of an exaggeration, if at all. No, no one thinks it's supposed to be a 40k film, but you wouldn't have to change anything for it to be one.
    • Added to that, it's very similar in overall theme and tone to some of the more horrific stuff in the 40k fluff. And the design aesthetic, as mentioned, is very similar. Compare the Event Horizon◊ and some Imperial ships◊, and it's easy to think that one design eventually lead to the others. Also, the place the Event Horizon went is described as "a place of pure chaos," to which any 40k fan will nod sagely and say "that's what happens when you forget to turn on the Gellar field." It's almost certain that the filmmaker's had no knowledge of 40k, and the points of commonality are just coincidental, but they're good enough that the film actually could be slipped into 40k canon (such as it is) without any difficulty.
    • One of the screenwriters, Philip Eisner has acknowledged that Warhammer 40k did influence the story, specifically talking about the similarities between The Warp in 40k and what the Event Horizon experiences on its maiden voyage.
• Within a minute a crew member can understand that it's Latin in the Event Horizon's last transmission, but the entire accident investigation team that Earth presumably would have had in "The largest space accident ever" no one noticed?
  • They didn't have it to hand: that was the ship's log version recorded on the local disc. Odds are, the scrambled bit never made it beyond the singularity until the Event Horizon came back to be found.
    • Yes they did. The recording was played during the briefing before the crew reached the Event Horizon. The very reason the crew was going on this rescue mission was because Earth heard the ship's distress call.
    • Just because part of the message made it through doesn't mean the whole thing did. It's very easy for enough of the message to get garbled in transmission that they made the simple mistake.
    • Even if the folks on Earth were aware of what the message actually said, the Event Horizon and what happened to her is too valuable to simply ignore. This is humanity's shot at getting out of our own solar system, our chance to survive the eventual death of our sun, there's no way everyone's going to ignore that just because the distress call is vaguely creepy.
    • The recording they had was unclear. It's likely they DID have it, and heard the 'liberate...me'. It took a lot of careful, CAREFUL listening to hear the full one. 'libera te tutemet'....ex inferis.' (And, only the Event Horizon's local copy has the SECOND half of the log...where everything goes to, well...hell.)
    • Weir plays the original transmission, which is incomprehensible. Then he says that they put it through audio filters to reveal the voice speaking, and he says no one was able to figure out what it was saying. Weir is clearly presenting it as a conundrum that experts on Earth were never able to solve even though they had years to do so. DJ picks up on the fact that it's Latin instantly. He has no established superhuman translation or hearing abilities. The implication is simply that he speaks Latin, and no one on Earth who listened to the recording spoke Latin. You'd think that in all the years they spent studying the recording, they'd have tried to figure out what language was being spoken. Latin might be a "dead" language, but it's pretty easy to identity.
• After the Lewis & Clarke is damaged, why not simply use the Event Horizon's conventional engines to return to Earth? When it disappeared, it was provisioned for a return flight for a much larger crew, so supplies shouldn't be an issue, nor should fuel. Granted, after seven years the engines flight-worthiness may have degraded, but the crew never seems to consider the issue.
  • Um, you're suggesting that they intentionally stay on the Event Horizon? Not only that, but intentionally bring it closer to Earth? Sure, why not? What could possibly go wrong?
  • Plus, the Lewis and Clarke's crew is trained in the operation of their own ship, not the Event Horizon. And they were all already sufficiently creeped out that none of them wanted to be on that ship a moment longer than necessary. Even without the (at the point, largely unknown) potential of bringing some horrific Eldritch Abomination back to Earth, none of them were in any mood to screw around with this obviously fucked-up ship.
  • One point that was made early on was that the Event Horizon's air filtration system had been corroded, thus causing carbon dioxide buildup (similar to what happened to Apollo 13) that would eventually suffocate the crew in less than a day. Further on, it took the Event Horizon a whole year to reach Neptune on conventional propulsion, and that was before whatever damage its trip to Hell caused it (which may have extended to its sub-light drives). Thus the reason why the crew was adamant about getting the Lewis and Clark back up and running; to remain on the Event Horizon in itself (even discounting the Eldritch presence) would have been literal suicide.
  • Yes, it took a year to reach Neptune, but not saying the crew would be awake the whole time. Dust off the engines, point it towards the inner planets, program a course to Earth, and jump in the stasis tubes before the engines fire. Riding home in style...
    • Setting aside the Eldritch Abomination stuff, presumably part of the reason the initial test of the ship was done 3 billion clicks away from the nearest human outpost was in case something went wrong with the gravity drive. Presumably there is some risk (however small) that the drive fails catastrophically and a renegade black hole shows up in the solar system. Better that kind of thing happens out by Neptune rather than, say, Earth.
• One minor one - the Lewis & Clarke' crew is disturbed by received radio transmissions from when the Event Horizon first appeared, yet, when stranded on the Event Horizon, Starke reads off the communications system is offline.... so how did the EH send the message?
  • The Event Horizon laid the bait, then played the busted card. Once you get the prey in the trap, you don't want it phoning home, right? No bets: almost every "broken" part of the ship could fix itself if it wanted it to.
    • It also explains why the guy giving the Distress Call in the hell dimension was speaking in Latin instead of the more common and understandable English. It was a way to lure people in.
    • There's a far more mundane possibility to consider: when the Lewis & Clarke was docking alongside the Event Horizon, Smith ignored Weir's protests that an antenna array near the Event Horizon's airlock wasn't a load-bearing structure and just clamped the Lewis & Clarke onto it, destroying the antenna in the process. That means it was possible for the Event Horizon to send the message, as the communications system wasn't busted until the Lewis & Clarke arrived.
• A minor note - in the beginning, Starke tells Weir Miller doesn't like having complete strangers on the ship. But isn't the Lewis & Clarke primarily a search & rescue ship? As Miller says, "Someone drops the ball, we get the call." So, due to the nature of their mission, shouldn't they be accustomed to passengers on their ship?
  • They are a Search and Rescue team, they don't tend to bring people along, unless a specialist is needed and even then, usually it is a well known associate of the team, Real Life S&R tend to vet the people they work with pretty thoroughly, build up a bond of trust, make sure the person isn't prone to panic, Weir is a specialist, but he is not known by the team, they are just lumped with him because he is the only person who knows the Event Horizon in and out, and the movie showed how much of a liability he was.
• Why exactly does a search-and-rescue vessel carry a complement of missiles? Space Pirates might be a possible reason, but the film never mentions anything of the sort (or anything at all about space traffic other than that it exists, really), leaving the matter to speculation only.
  • The answer to this is relatively simple. Say you have a ship that has its engines craps out and its roughly the size of the Event Horizon. To put it simply, there's no way in hell that the dinky little Lewis and Clark could probably move that thing without destroying its own engines in the process and further FUBARing the situation. Thus, it would be necessary to totally destroy the ship because it would be a menace to navigation.
  • Given the ranks and the strict rules enforced, it does appear that the Lewis & Clark is some sort of organised military vessel generally suited for Search and Rescue, but equipped for various situations it might find itself in. Also given the general wear n' tear of the ship it’s possible they have quite a lot of old equipment from previous missions.
  • It's also likely that rescue ships like the Lewis & Clark might be assigned to carry out asteroid-deflection missions, intercepting rocks that might hit planets or interfere with system traffic and knocking them off course with missile strikes.
• What happened to Justin? He becomes possessed by the ship, is put into a sleep tube after his failed space walk and somehow survives to the end and at no point does anyone wonder if the Evilz is still inside him, patiently waiting until, dunno, they return to Earth. This feels more like Producers demanding cuts and so the conclusion to Baby Bear's (why is Peters confusingly referred to as Mama Bear?) story arc never survived.