Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on March 21, 2003, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
Many Stephen King-based films have been criticized for departing too much from the author’s text, but Dreamcatcher represents a case where less fidelity might have helped. I haven’t read this particular novel, but the movie feels very much as if director/co-scripter Lawrence Kasdan and screenwriter William Goldman tried to cram too much of the book’s contents into a feature running time. If Reader’s Digest Condensed Books was in the film business, this seems like the kind of movie it might turn out.
Dreamcatcher is hardly a hack job—every element has been assembled with professionalism—and the first 45 minutes or so hold out an immense amount of promise. We’re introduced to four longtime friends—Henry (Thomas Jane), “Beaver” (Jason Lee), Pete (Timothy Olyphant) and Jonesy (Damian Lewis)—who are all in shared possession of some form of psychic ability, which we learn is linked to their childhood friendship with a mentally challenged boy called Duddits. When the foursome head up to a snowy mountain cabin for an annual hunting trip, a more threatening paranormal phenomenon interrupts, first frightening the local animals into mass exodus (a neat scene). Then a hunter shows up bearing what looks like a bad case of frostbite. Soon, his condition takes a turn for the far worse, resulting in a long, very grotesque and extremely effective setpiece whose particulars won’t be revealed here for those unfamiliar with the story.
At about this point, one might start wondering when top-billed Morgan Freeman is going to have an actual presence in the story; by my reckoning, he only makes one brief appearance in the entire first hour. More to the point, he isn’t really missed. Kasdan and his actors establish a likable camaraderie, one that is frighteningly shattered by the hunter’s arrival, and the movie hums along while staying devoted to the quartet. Then Freeman shows up, and the whole thing begins to fall apart. He plays Colonel Curtis, head of an Army unit devoted to tracking extraterrestrials, and the hunter’s “frostbite” is actually a lethal alien virus that has led Curtis’ team to quarantine the entire area.
With that, the focus broadens to encompass Curtis’ ruthless war against the invaders, one in which—surprise, surprise—innocent human lives are expendable in the cause of saving the planet. The point of view is wrenched away from the people who have been set up as our heroes to settle on this all-too-predictable military hardcase—when Curtis calls a private who has displeased him into his office, you know the poor guy’s going to get more than a verbal dressing down. The colonel also takes his second-in-command (Tom Sizemore) on a tour of a quarantine area full of doomed locals, a scene that would have had a lot more power if seen through the eyes of one of the four friends. To be sure, Dreamcatcher would be less of an “event” movie without the expanded canvas, but Kasdan and Goldman’s narrative becomes so scattered that the chills fizzle out.
They also have directly appropriated certain elements of the book that simply don’t play on screen. Jonesy winds up becoming possessed by an evil extraterrestrial, his human side retreating into his mind’s “Memory Warehouse.” It’s an intriguing idea that may work splendidly on the page, but showing Lewis running through a huge library containing boxes of his memories comes off as a literary device played too literally on screen. Same goes for moments when Jonesy’s true self is able to break through, resulting in one-man conversations between himself and the creature that has stolen his body. For reasons known only to the filmmakers, Lewis—a Brit convincingly playing American—uses his real accent for the alien’s speech, and having the evil force speaking in plummy English tones turns the whole conceit into something out of a Monty Python sketch.
And there’s more, including flashbacks to the group’s youth that ring uncomfortably close to Stand By Me and It, and the 11th-hour appearance of the adult Duddits (Donnie Wahlberg) himself, now stricken with leukemia. All the huggermugger involving Curtis might well have been stricken from the film scenario in favor of more scenes involving Duddits, his reunion with his old friends and his part in the overall story. As it stands, this psychic’s presence in this alien-invasion tale plays largely as a convenience and a coincidence, one the filmmakers try to justify through a very silly climactic scene (which, I’m told, is not in King’s novel). Oh, and the dreamcatcher itself doesn’t have much to do with anything here; it’s just a good-looking prop handy for ominous high-angle shots.
I don’t like to come down too hard on Dreamcatcher because, as I noted before, it has clearly been put together by talented people. The actors all deliver solid performances (though Freeman does more for his role than it does for him), the production values, particularly John Seale’s alternately beautiful and threatening photography, are topnotch and James Newton Howard’s score contributes strongly to the tension. Steve Johnson’s makeup FX and Industrial Light & Magic’s digital work meld seamlessly to create the very convincing alien attackers, even if Kasdan gives us a good look at one of the chief invaders too early on. Yet the director ultimately fails to pay off on his shared background in character-bonding stories such as The Big Chill and Grand Canyon and FX spectaculars like The Empire Strikes Back and Raiders of the Lost Ark. The surprising thing is that, for all the megabuck accoutrements here, the former side winds up being served far better than the latter.
