Dir. Lawrence Kasdan, 2003, US/Can, 136 mins
Cast: Morgan Freeman, Thomas Jane, Jason Lee, Damian Lewis, Tom Sizemore, Donnie Wahlberg
Based on the best-selling novel by Stephen King, Lawrence Kasdan's Dreamcatcher follows four friends who receive psychic powers as children when they aid and befriend a mentally retarded boy named Duddits.
Twenty years ago they were just kids in a small town in Maine - kids who found the courage to respond heroically to childhood cruelty. In saving Duddits, they unexpectedly gained a fifth friend at the centre of their circle. Even more unexpected were the uncanny powers he conveyed to them, bonding them all beyond ordinary friendship.
Over time, Jonesy, Henry, Pete and Beaver grow up to be men who feel isolated from the rest of the world. Now the four are men with separate lives and separate problems, haunted by the memory of heroism, with powers that are more of a burden than a gift. Unable to understand or master their powers, they are left with the nagging frustration of possessing great potential, but not the ability to realize it. When a shocking accident almost claims one of them, they don't at first recognize the return of the eeriness that is somehow linked to Duddits.
Jonesy (Damian Lewis), Henry (Thomas Jane), Beaver (Jason Lee), and Pete (Timothy Olyphant), reunite every winter at a cabin deep in the Maine woods to hunt, drink, and celebrate the bond they share with Duddits (Donnie Wahlberg) and each other. However, when they reunite for their annual visit to a hunting cabin in the north woods, anticipating only the warmth and humor that nourishes them, they are overtaken by a gathering doom. First comes a stranger, a lost hunter unaware of the terrible contagion he bears. On his heels is a blizzard, a vicious storm in which something much more ominous moves - a deadly alien force that will consume some of the foursome and force those who make it to the end of the road to once again summon their forgotten strength. and confront an unparalleled horror. While a special alien invasion branch of the government (lead by Morgan Freeman and Tom Sizemore) works around the clock to quarantine the town and find the source, the four men left alone in the cabin must find other means to combat this ever-growing presence of evil.
A crazy-quilt combination of horror, thriller, sci-fi, drama, and action genres, Dreamcatcher features aspects of other King screen adaptations such as Stand By Me, IT, and the Tommyknockers, along with films such as The Thing and Signs. Dreamcatcher has the distinction of being the first book Stephen King wrote after the terrible incident in 1999, when he was struck, and nearly killed, by a drunk driver while out for a walk. This would explain the many instances of pivotal car accidents in the story. As channeled through writer/director Lawrence Kasdan (The Big Chill, Grand Canyon, and the underrated and criminally underseen Mumford), Dreamcatcher embodies all the best things about King adaptations and crams them into one single motion picture. It has the alien invasions, the childhood memories (shades of Stand By Me), the gifted handicapped, and the tongue-twisting wordplay, which makes it often exhausting, but an entertaining ride all the way.
You do have to find a different state of mind while watching Dreamcatcher. Kasdan has approached the film in a stylistically and verbally heightened way. The film is directed very broadly, using elaborate and unnatural dialog, and aggressively expressive characters to lead the journey. This could be unsettling and irritating for some. It is also a big, old fashioned, B-level monster movie, ripped from the 1950s, complete with severe, John Wayne loving army generals and a distinct (and welcomed) lack of pretension in dealing with the appearance of the weasels. I have not read the King novel, and I've been informed that the film's final act differs greatly from what King conjured up. Judging it solely as a movie, however, Dreamcatcher is riveting genre entertainment, and is well-made all around (including marvelous winter photography by John Seale). Because of King's always unique brand of the macabre, Kasdan has created a film that defies easy explanation, and run circles around what other filmmakers are doing with their overly hip attempts at sci-fi/horror.
As the main villain, the weasels are a mostly CG creation. However, Kasdan does have fun with their appearance, which is a cross between the Dune sandworms and the face huggers from Alien. Kasdan also finds creative ways to bring King's bizarre prose to the screen. A critical movement of the film takes places directly, and quite literally, in the recesses of Jonesy's mind, which Kasdan and King imagine as this delightfully cavernous warehouse where the memories of your life are stored as dusty old files.
A tricky concept, but well played here. Kasdan also sells the `gifts' of the group well, employing his knack for storytelling along with some dangerously corny CGI to keep the supernatural theme running throughout the film. Lawrence Kasdan is not known for his forays into this genre (though he is the man who co-wrote The Empire Strikes Back and Raiders Of The Lost Ark), but for a first timer helming an otherworldly horror film, this is good stuff.
Shizana Arshad
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