Image credit: IDW
I’m not a big fan of the prequels. Many of them fall into the trap of over-explaining events for which we know the outcome, and we don’t need everything to be fleshed out to understand the ending of the story. Therefore, I approached Event Horizon: Dark Descent #1 with some trepidation. A prequel to the intense sci-fi horror movie “Event Horizon,” one of director Paul W.S. Anderson’s only decent films.
In the movie, the Event Horizon, an experimentally powered ship that was originally designed to drill holes in space to travel vast distances, disappears on its maiden voyage and reappears several years later. Searches for the Event Horizon have revealed all sorts of horrific events, including where the ship ended up as it plunged into the unknown.
The movie is brutal, effective, bloody, and scary, even more overtly space haunted than Alien, one of Anderson’s favorite films.
This prequel comic, Dark Descent, tells the story of what happened to the crew. We only get a fleeting glimpse of it in a horrifyingly disturbing and gruesome flashback, but do we really need to see everything that was rendered on the page and never shown in detail?
Based on this first question, no, it’s not. It’s a little disappointing to see the crew so sparse. It feels like there’s a largely similar crew to the one in the movie sent to investigate the Event Horizon, but in the flashbacks it feels like even more people have wandered into the strange world and are affected by its terrifying effects.
It’s also a bit frustrating that almost everyone on the film’s crew has a sordid past, and as anyone who’s seen the film will know, some troubling events unfold before the drive even begins.
I wasn’t that crazy about Latin-speaking Brits either. The added touch of strange Latin spoken over the crew’s recordings in the film made it feel like the crew had absorbed an ancient evil, but it’s needlessly explained here.
Despite falling into almost every trap that made the prequel truly unsatisfying for me, I enjoyed its gritty atmosphere and subdued color scheme of the art. I mean, aside from the splash of crimson, we all know there will be more to come as this series progresses.
Will I stay there to find out? Probably not, but it’s interesting that IDW’s “dark” horror impression (yes, the logo looks just as bad as the standard IDW redesign, plus it looks like it says “In W”) is essentially led by a prequel to a film that wasn’t universally acclaimed at all upon its original release in 1997.
But even though I’ve always been a fan and saw it on the big screen the first day it was released, I never thought Event Horizon needed a prequel. Atmospherically yes, but based on the evidence in this first issue, I might have been right.
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