Event Horizon - A Peek Into My World

I always have my best ideas in the most inaccessible of places: the shower, waking from a dead sleep in the middle of the night, riding down the freeway. But let me qualify that: I usually have what I think are great ideas in these places, but on the occasions I've had to actually record them and come back to them later?

Not so great.

Case in point: the other night, I woke up and for no reason I can imagine, I was thinking about the movie, Event Horizon. Now, my position on this movie has never changed from the first time I saw it, and I've watched it a few times since then just to reaffirm my original position: Event Horizon is not a good movie for one, very specific reason (and consider this a Spoilers Alert, because it's not like it really matters in the long-run of things, but just in case): it doesn't pay off on the fire in space.

See, early in the movie, there is a poignant moment where the main character discusses fire in space - how it is so beautiful that it looks deceptively harmless - and how it looks like liquid. The discussion is so pointed that, as a writer, I immediately made a mental note as to how this was the gun in the first act. If you don't know what that means, it's from a famous quote by a famous playwright, who said that, if you show a pistol on the mantle in the first act, it has to be fired by the end of the third act - or something very close to that So I watched the entire rest of the movie waiting for the fire in space, which is never shown. Or, if it is (it's been several years since I watched the film), it is so anticlimactic and downplayed that I didn't notice it.

Now, the point to all this is that the movie should have shown the fire in space, period. Did they run out of money in the budget? Was a “fire in space” scene ever even penned in the original script? If such a scene was cut, why wasn’t the big set-up discussion, where the character makes such a pointed effort to describe, at length, what fire in space looks like? And this isn’t like one of those movies where a monster is hinted at, but you never quite see the monster; it is just a totally pointless scene that sets you up for something that is never mentioned again!

So, for no reason at all, I woke up a few nights ago with this on my mind and I couldn’t go back to sleep immediately, so I wrote it down. Like I say, my position on this movie has never changed, so it’s not like this was some great epiphany - it is a thought I’ve had many times over since I first saw the film - but I figured I would share my position with y’all and see if anyone else noticed this and I knew I would forget to blog about it if I didn’t write it down, so I did. Thing is, it was the middle of the night, and I just grabbed the first piece of scrap paper I had handy.

I woke up today and remembered the note, but couldn’t remember what the note was about, so I spent basically the first hour of my day searching for this note, only to find that it was the same thought I’d had for years about this stinker of a movie! Nothing important, nothing timely - nothing at all, really...

And you wonder why I don’t get more done...