Dr. William Neir was played by Sam Neill in the movie Event Horizon.
Biography[]
He was the scientist, who built the ship Event Horizon, a ship that is able to flight faster than the speed of light by circumventing the rules of physics by using a gravity drive. He is sent with a salvage crew to find out what happened to the ship after it was found seven years later near Neptune.
He is also traumatized because of the death of his wife, whom committed suicide years earlier. He then hallucinates his wife is alive, but this is due to the ship manifesting his fears and secrets like Miller. He becomes obsessed with the one thing he cares about: the gravity drive, which he prompts no one will ever shut down. Smith, Miller's co-pilot, starts to blame Weir for killing the last crew and that he should pay the price for what he did.
It causes him to give in to the wishes of the ship and become his henchman in its quest to kidnap the salvage crew and bring it to the dimension it has flown before, a world of complete chaos and evil that can also be described as hell, where they would end up dead in a real horrible way just like it killed in the same way the previous crew.
He plants an explosive onboard the "Lewis and Clark", having been possessed after getting into an argument with Miller, whom planned to blow up the ship with TAC missiles and made sure it would be completely vaporized. When Miller tells Weir to find his way back to the "Clark," which is the closest thing to home, Weir says, "I am home."
In this quest, he also kills part of the crewmen, but the captain stops him by sending him into space, which presumably kills him but later, he appears resurrected and tries to stop Miller from saving the remaining crew but fails when Miller sacrifices himself, blowing the Event Horizon in half, leaving the survivors in the front to escape in stasis, while the drive core carrying Miller and Weir is sucked back into the hell dimension. It's unknown if Miller and Weir were killed by the explosion that split the ship in half or if they're both in hell with what's left of the ship.