The screenplay adaptation by William Goldman and Lawrence Kasdan follows Stephen King’s intermittently obtuse novel as closely as one could expect, sometimes to a fault. But it also actually improves some aspects by streamlining certain plot elements—mainly the byrus storyline (the alien infection as it’s called in the book but not the film). The film unclutters the conundrums involved with the book’s endowing the byrus victims with temporary telepathic abilities, a byproduct that I felt kept too many balls in the air for King to juggle.

But like the book, the screenplay also depicts many events that seem to raise more questions than it answers, but not in the welcome philosophical/metaphysical sense of awe and continued wonder that a reader/viewer experiences long afterward, but instead in the plain old simple sense of plot illogic.

For instance, the biggest change from the book (WARNING: major spoiler in this paragraph) is that Duddits (adequately depicted by Donnie Wahlberg) is more than just a telepathic homing device who leads our heroes to the bad guy, but here in the movie is also ...get ready for this...a benevolent alien monster who battles the chief meanie in the film’s climax prefacing his charge with the goofiest war-cry you’ll likely ever hear.

But because of this new Duddits incarnation, one now questions incredulously, “You mean, he’s been an alien all his life, waiting for this moment to come??!! Does this mean his mother is an alien too? Or did she unwittingly give birth to this alien? Did the alien possess him at an early age, preparing for the bad guy’s arrival some 20 to 30 years later? And no matter which of these is true, why is he so tardy coming to the rescue at the end, lagging behind in the car? Wouldn’t he (it?) have morphed into its true alien identity immediately when brought to the scene instead of waiting so perilously close to the end of the world befalling??”

The film adapts the book’s many characters’ development in quick neat strokes in its first half, following several examples from the book closely, each scene of the four adult leads, clueing us in on their telepathic capacities. The introduction to Pete Moore although acted slightly hammily by Timothy Olyphant, does feature a deft performance by the actress Ingrid Kavelaars in the small part of the customer Trish whose car keys Pete finds using his telepathy. She mixes a poignantly executed appreciation of the results with being undeniably creeped out by the guy. You see well enough from her expression that there’s no way she’s going to keep her end of the bargain to meet Pete for dinner after he locates her keys. It’s a nice subtle turn that one wishes the main cast discharged throughout the film.

Mr. Olyphant has been better in other films like Go, and he actually fares mostly well here, but he’s saddled with an overly expositional monologue at one point later while he’s slugging down beers by an emergency makeshift campfire.

Jason Lee makes a sweet simple Beaver, capturing that character accurately, and the film might have been better off had he played the main hero, Henry. He would actually have been more fitting the book’s description of Henry (thin, bookish, a bit nerdy) than this film’s typical he-man Hollywood hero in actor Thomas Jane. I wouldn’t have so much minded this predictable movie adaptation swap though if only Mr. Jane was a better actor. It’s hard to tell how poor he is most of the time as his dialogue is kept to a minimum, but once he has to put a paragraph together, the jig is up. He’s absurdly bad in one particular scene inside the chase vehicle near the end when he outlines for Owen Underhill (played by Tom Sizemore) some of the background history of Duddits and Gary Jones. Mr. Jane takes on a portentous-sounding baritone that’s straight out of the Joe Friday school of acting.

Again though, part of the problem for Mr. Jane is that he has to explain something that doesn’t sound as logically arrived at as he has to try and make it sound. He reasons that his friend Gary Jones (actor Damian Lewis) once died and this must be why a part of him has been resistant to a complete possession by the alien they’ve named Mr. Gray. Ah yes, of course. Why couldn’t the screenplay have settled for the more reasonable and simple explanation that Jonesy’s (as they call him) gifted mind, unlike anyone else’s on Earth, has prevented the absolute takeover? That the telepathy he’s nurtured since boyhood thanks to Duddits, helped him create the small room in his mind’s vast warehouse where he takes refuge from Mr. Gray?

But come to think of it, this very plot device raises another question about the script’s and the book’s stupidity. As entertaining as the situation in the book was, it leads one to ask, “Why didn’t Mr. Gray simply possess someone else if he was so annoyed with his inability to take over Jonesy completely?” Mr. Gray had plenty of opportunities to, and indeed did leave Jonesy several times to possess others for a stretch, but he always came back to Jonesy. If it was a matter of not wanting to leave Jonesy behind with the awareness of what Mr. Gray was up to, Mr. Gray could have entered someone else and then have that person kill Jonesy. In the book as well as in the movie, Mr. Gray even enters a policeman—what better way than that to carry on his diabolical mission instead of having to deal with Jonesy’s injured body and subversive thoughts thwarting the plan?

As Jonesy, actor Damian Lewis is arguably the most successful performer in the band of brothers joined together since boyhood when they rescued Duddits from a nasty torturing by some older teens. Lewis is earnest and natural and then later has a fun time portraying the schizoid Jonesy/Mr. Gray.

Mr. Gray tends to have a British accent that Pete Moore remarks sounds like a “James Bond villain” when he confronts Jonesy/Mr. Gray. It feels as though the screenplay was trying to retain a character element from the book—that being Jonesy’s fondness for movies—the idea being that Mr. Gray’s concept of villainy is drawn from Jonesy’s concept of villainy as typified by movies. (Although why would Mr. Gray so willingly see his mission as villainous?) Is this the screenplay’s attempt at justifying a playful opportunity for the actor and director? If so, they commit another error in logic: Mr. Gray may have sounded like this to Jonesy while still trapped in his own mind with Mr. Gray, but would Mr. Gray let himself sound like this to other people and risk giving himself away? We already hear him accurately talk like Jonesy, so why would he adapt what he knows is Jonesy’s idea of a bad guy’s voice when he speaks to Pete and later on to a truck driver?

Nevertheless, Lewis has fun with the part, and we appreciate his adeptness as an actor.

Donnie Wahlberg is good enough as the mentally challenged Duddits, a portrayal that almost feels reprised from his troubled character in The Sixth Sense. You could quibble though that his portrayal of the elder Duddits’ specific vocal symptoms and facial expressions vary hugely from the young actor portraying him in the flashback sequences. Somewhere along the line wasn’t anybody paying attention to this sort of continuity?

Those flashback scenes in general all feel a bit clunky. The young actors embodying the four principles have nowhere near the charisma and chemistry that the four young actors of Stephen King/Rob Reiner’s Stand By Me displayed. Those four kids carried an entire film whereas the scenes here with the boys strain your concern as it is.

Morgan Freeman is cast as the book’s Colonel Kurtz, although here he’s renamed Curtis. His white-haired flat-top and white bushy eyebrows though are forcefully yanked from the novel and pasted onto his film character (for flair? for a nod toward faithful adaptation’s sake?) and although he’s mostly fine (Come on naysayers, is Morgan Freeman really capable of a bad performance as hard as a film might try to make him give?) this film will never ever appear on a highlight reel of his career.

Inconsistencies plague this film throughout—inconsistencies in the acting (some good, some bad), and inconsistencies in all other facets.

The most abysmally poor screenwriting decision, and the laziest one at that (“Heck, we can just blame it on Stephen King since that’s how he wrote it in the book!”) occurs in what by now you’ve heard of as the “Stupid Things Characters in Movies Do When Dealing With Monsters” scene. There is poor Jason Lee as Beaver sitting on top of the toilet bowl lid, trapping the sh*t weasel inside while Jonesy goes to retrieve some duct tape (Duct Tape-It’s not just for sealing your windows against biological weapons!). So Beaver’s feeling nervous and wants to calm down. He needs a toothpick of course. A clean one is just out of reach….he strains to reach…arms outstretched…he REALLY wants that toothpick. He wants it so much that he’s willing to risk letting up enough on the bowl lid for an instant allowing the creature to burst out. What’s so tragic about this scene is that the same results could have been accomplished so easily without resorting to something so idiotic. For instance, the floor is coated with blood, and we’ve already seen how slippery it is when Beaver and Jonesy first bust into the bathroom. They slip and slide before Beaver is able to get to the bowl and trap the menace inside. Several thumps against the underside send Beaver jolting upward, so it’s established there’s quite a bit of force involved. All that was needed was for a push to come violently enough for Beaver to lose his footing again on the blood-coated floor and perhaps even slide his bloody hand against the wall as he tries regaining his balance. The actor and set design did a convincing job (Mr. Lee’s miming the force exerted by the creature, and the scene designer’s caking and coating the floor and wall lubricously with blood), that this would have been completely credible. But instead the laughably lame depiction as it happens taints the rest of the movie

The cinematography, by the superb John Seale, skillfully captures various images with eerieness and technical wonder. Several bird’s-eye-view shots of Henry’s SUV winding along a road in a wintry white, tree-filled forest recall the creepy helicopter swooping high angle shots that delivered the audience to the Overlook Manor in Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of King’s The Shining. They’re reminiscent also of the maze of hedges from that same film. One shot in particular had me scratching my head—it’s a straight overhead of the vehicle, way overhead, only the camera isn’t moving at all. The other swooping overheads are easily explained since the helicopter is moving, but a perfectly still overhead? Even a hovering helicopter surely would betray some movement at some point over the duration of the shot (not a short one either, but one held sufficiently long enough to engage my awe).

The grisliness of the novel, and specifically the “sh*t weasels” as they are called are most effectively detailed. Even as one reads about these creatures in the book, one can’t help wondering, “Um…they look like what? Big worm-like slithering things with razor sharp teeth? Ooooookay, whatever you say…” But damn it, here they are in the film—your imagination no longer at play—and they sure as hell look very believable and not at all as cheesy as they might have been. They are vicious looking little beasts, ugly and ferociously aggressive.

The famous animals-leaving-the-forest shots are very nicely rendered too. Another question though, one for the book as well as the screenplay, is how does the Army possibly expect to quarantine the entire area’s animals? The people okay, but every single bear, deer, raccoon, rabbit, squirrel, chipmunk, insect and bird? Preposterous.

Cinematographically all is fine although I was worried at the outset during the four brief introductions to the principles. There was a muddiness to the scenes that belied the rest of the film’s panache. Some of the Hole-In-The-Wall (their hunting cabin) interior scenes also looked either underlit or overlit as though undercompensating or overcompensating for the overwhelmingly dark brown wood walls, ceiling, and furniture that surround everything, swallowing the light.

But another well-shot incident of a hard-to-film-literary concept is when Jonesy thinks he sees a deer that turns out to be a human. The film smartly depicts his error by masking the shot through Jonesy’s rifle scope, constricting his and our view so that when we see what looks very much like a deer’s eye, it becomes instead a man’s coat button when we cut back to it again from Jonesy’s reaction shot. It’s so expertly done I wanted to see those three quick shots again to figure out if there was any film trickery involved (actually showing a deer’s eye perhaps?). I’ll have to wait for a video cassette or DVD to investigate that possibility.

Perhaps its unavoidable when seeing a movie so soon after reading the book it’s based on, but I also felt that the editing (by the great Carol Littleton) strove too efficiently to get through the piecemeal introductory scenes.

Interestingly, being familiar with the novel, there’s a point while watching the movie when you think, “Wait a second, we’re only up to this part of the story so far? Wow, this is going to be a long movie!” To the editing’s credit, I don’t really issue that as a complaint—the film somehow keeps you interested, so it wasn’t out of restlessness that I noticed the story’s progress. And although the film is perhaps on the long side (2 hours and 14 minutes), it does start to wrap up rather abruptly, as did the book.

We cut to the chase, figuratively and literally, somewhat quickly, bypassing much of the book’s events in the detention camp. The whole climactic chase scene in the book was supported by the fact that the alien virus gave those afflicted telepathy, but now that the film eliminates that aspect, they needed another explanation for how Curtis is able to track down Owen and Henry. There’s a pretty nifty shot, zooming in close to the pearl-handled gun given to Owen earlier by Curtis, and revealing (to the audience only) a homing device emitting a signal for Curtis to track. But why? Why is it there? Unlike the book in which Kurtz and Owen Underhill had an antagonistic relationship from the get-go, here in the film they are good friends. It’s an absurd prediction on Kurtz’s part that at that point in the so-far-so-good relationship with Owen and smooth-sailing mission that he would need to slip a tracking device on Owen.

Dreamcatcher, the movie and the book, features a potentially fun and imaginative hodgepodge of plot devices culled from both horror and science fiction genres, but unfortunately weaves too tangled a web to free us from its mechanics with understanding after we’re snared. Both formats engage us, but both formats similarly disappoint us in the end. Almost like certain dreams, we appreciate the imaginativeness involved, but also recognize it as one of those dreams that is based more on indigestion than on a wise and mysterious confluence of psychological forces and symbols. And you know what kind of weasel is likely to spring from indigestion.

BillTK’s TRIVIA QUESTION: Writer William Goldman said there were four scenes from the book that “he knew would be in the movie.” Three of them were the bathroom scene, the Henry burning down the cabin scene, and the attack on the alien spaceship scene. The fourth scene though actually got cut from the movie. What scene was it?

ANSWER: The scene in which the incarcerated break out of the detention camp. No one got it so the score is till:
tbrown -1
Everyone else so far: 0



Recommended:
No