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Comment by pico303 | Hacker News Reader

One of my favorite actors of all time. If you haven’t seen it, watch The Dish.

also the Event Horizon, his change of character is something you don't forget..

Not my favourite movie though. The horror in space trope is a very tired one.

Alongside the poorly lit spaceship. Spaceships are workplaces and workplaces should provide adequate illumination so you can see what you are doing.

But I LOVE what he did for the New Zealand flag.

Pandorum was pretty crazy (he wasn’t in it, but it was an odd space horror movie, and I feel that Event Horizon kind of paved the way).

The part I liked in Event Horizon was Laurence Fishburn's character seeing the logs of the crew going crazy and immediately turning it off and saying, "We're leaving."

Probably the smartest decision made in a horror film. Time to get out of Dodge.

Yeah! Its a great movie if you dont try to nitpick stuff, which is hard for me to do on a lot of things too.

Neill: We can't just abandon this ship, we just found her Fishburn: I have no intentions of abandoning her. We will get far enough away from it and blow it up. Fuck this ship.

Australian flag. The black, red and yellow flag he replaced the Union Jack with is the Australian first nations flag

My bad. I need to retake my geography classes from high school

You're sweet as mate, we're used to it eh.

Hell, it's why one of our former PMs had a referendum to try to replace our flag.

He got seated under an Aussie flag once at an international big important meeting, thus he decided to spend $21 million getting people to vote on whether or not to adopt a flag that looked like the logo a meat company would stick on a frozen leg of lamb being exported to the EU [0]. We ultimately voted against the meat wrapper.

My personal preference was for either the Black Jack [1] (because I loved how it co-opted the Union Jack with Māori design elements - the curved white koru) and tbh, we do love the colour black, or...

...Seeing as we're having a bit of a silly referendum anyway, good ol Laser Kiwi [2] (the white feather thing is the silver fern/ponga, adopted as our national plant when pteridomania was running rampant in the British Empire, and is often used as a logo for national sports teams, and for naming several female sports teams - Silver Ferns, White Ferns, Black Ferns), because who doesn't love the idea of shooting lasers out of your eyes?

John Oliver had a lot of fun with the whole debate. [3]

Oh, and fun fact, I believe during the anti-ICE protests, some Minnesotans were inspired by Laser Kiwi and brought about Laser Loon. [4]

----

[0]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/38/NZ...

[1]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5d/NZ_flag_...

[2]: https://nzhistory.govt.nz/sites/default/files/styles/wide/pu...

[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_2tL--HMIo

[4]: https://images.thespinoff.co.nz/1/2026/02/Tinas-FeatureImage...

Pretty sure it's "But I LOVE what he did for the Australian flag." - he is a kiwi but that's arguably the Aussie flag with the colonial bit replaced with the local one

Not arguably, definitely.

It's got white stars, it has the seven pointed "Commonwealth star", and astronomically, it's more correct as it includes Epsilon Crucis.

Our flag has red stars, no bonus commonwealth star, and for some reason, whoever designed our flag decided that ε Cru could go fuck itself.

And I love him to bits for insisting that in the future, Australia would surely have a) become a republic and b) embraced the Aborigine first peoples. It's a remarkably hopeful vision of the future for a movie where he ends up running around without eyes saying creepy shit.

> Spaceships are workplaces and workplaces

...with very constrained sources of power. Lighting places where humans are not is wasting that power.

You have a power plant capable of generating the energy needed to take you to relativistic speeds (at minimum) or punch holes through spacetime (a couple hundred orders of magnitude more) that’ll radiate a Hiroshima per second in waste heat (at 99.99999% efficiency converting energy into movement). You can certainly power a couple light bulbs.

Yeah but you save a couple bucks per ship if you cut the lighting to the absolute minimum required to keep crew shrinkage at an acceptable rate, and across the entire fleet that adds up to a nice bonus.

Australian flag.

* Their Southern Cross is more astronomically accurate (it includes Epsilon Crucis) our one omits it

* They have an additional seven pointed star to represent the six territories/states of Australia, the seventh point being added when they took control of Papua to represent anything else they added to the federation as time went on

* Their stars are white, ours are red

But fully agree, I loved that it the Union Jack was replaced with the Aborigine flag at Sam Neill's behest, because after all, it _is_ the future right?

> Alongside the poorly lit spaceship. Spaceships are workplaces and workplaces should provide adequate illumination so you can see what you are doing.

I always thought the same about CSI. Have the set designers ever been to a lab?

I know it was "a long, long time ago", but why hasn't adequate lighting been invented in the Star Wars Universe?

You have a humanoid rich enough to own a couple robots, but their house is apparently entirely lit by about one candlelight.

Even Horizon is a Warhammer 40k film that has nothing to do with Warhammer 40k.

Can you elaborate for those of us who don't know Warhammer?

In W40k the primary form of FTL travel is the Immaterium or Warp, a realm of pure psychic energy inhabited by the Chaos gods and countless demons. Spaceships traveling through the Warp need powerful protective shields lest they be possessed and consumed by said demons... which is exactly what happens in the movie.

https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Immaterium

Kinda reminds of the inter-dimensional angry aliens from The Expanse that made ships disappear when transiting through the ring gates.

That's always the role I remember first when I hear his name, because it seems so unusual for him and because he was so great in it.

Something that is burnt into me is saying "DO YOU SEE?", invoking the final lines of Neill in Event Horizon

"Where we're going, we won't need eyes to see."

It’s a wonderful little movie. Absolutely adorable.

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