The year 2047. A rescue spacecraft is sent to the edge of the solar system to find out what happened to the crew of the first starship designed to travel at superluminal speed and disappear without a trace. Suddenly it was discovered near the planet Neptune.
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After the commercial success of his first Hollywood work “Mortal Kombat,” big sci-fi fan Paul Anderson chose various projects. At first his eyes fell on several decades of brewing in the production hell of Arthur C. Clarke’s “Childhood’s End” adaptation, then Paul decided to send the future Kurt Russell to the army, but the pre-production of “Soldier” was delayed, because Kurt decided to make a perfect muscle machine out of his body.
In the end, Anderson settled on a script by Philip Eisner. The film’s plot was originally supposed to revolve around the spaceship “Through the Horizon,” which reappeared on the radar after its mysterious disappearance a few years ago. As an explanation for what happened on the ship, Eisner proposed a story around an unknown alien race conducting experiments on the ship’s crew. Anderson suggested rather quickly to exclude aliens from the plot and make a picture in the style of a haunted house, where the action takes place in space.
Paul did not hide the names of the paintings from which he drew inspiration – “The Shining” and “Ghost”. Quite a few people also add “Alien” to the list, but the only thing in common with Scott’s film is that the action takes place in space. The director deliberately abandoned the monster-movie, making the main antagonist a rather vague figure, bringing to the forefront the concept of what happened to the crew of “Through the Horizon” finding their way to hell.
Not only is “Through the Horizon” a hybrid of two genres, but dualism is present in almost everything in the film. The design of the spaceship, both interior and exterior, is impressive, which is not at all surprising: the creators photographed every millimeter of “Notre Dame Cathedral,” and then glued the various pieces together into a single mosaic. It turned out very spectacular, but at the same time such internal architecture is much more of a hindrance than a help in the functional plan of the ship.
Similarly effective is the overall visual layout of the picture, which at certain moments pulls the attention away from the many borrowings from other films. Anderson succeeds in the first half of the picture, where the rescuers try to figure out what happened on the ship, rather than the obligatory, and therefore uninteresting, run from death in the last forty-five minutes.
However, it is worth admitting that, years later, the film has acquired a certain cult fame. Watching it far from the first time, one is as naturally frightened by the numerous surprises of the ghost ship as when watching it for the first time. And in addition, the picture looks really gorgeous, and the concept of the plot is so unusual that you can forgive quite a lot for that.
Info Blu-ray
Video
Codec: HEVC / H.265 (76.1 Mb/s)
Resolution: Native 4K (2160p)
HDR: Dolby Vision, HDR10
Aspect ratio: 2.34:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.39:1
Audio
English: Dolby TrueHD 5.1 (48kHz, 24-bit)
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (48kHz, 24-bit)
English: Dolby Digital 5.1
German: Dolby Digital 5.1
Spanish: Dolby Digital 5.1
French: Dolby Digital 5.1
Italian: Dolby Digital 5.1
Japanese: Dolby Digital 5.1
Subtitles
English, English SDH, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Spanish
