That so many of King's works have been translated to the screen by Goldman (this is his third after Misery and Hearts in Atlantis) speaks a great deal to Goldman's relative vestigiality post-'70s (and to his dangerous capacity for smug gruel)--and explains to a degree how Dreamcatcher made it to the screen riddled as it is with the same sort of self-references and insular nature. It's not necessary to be familiar with King films (and novels) to watch Dreamcatcher, but it sure gives you something to do.
 |
|
THE FINAL FLIGHT OF THE OSIRIS|One of nine short subjects (collectively called The Animatrix) presented in the animé medium that most influenced The Matrix (particularly Oshii's Ghost in the Shell), The Final Flight of the Osiris ("Osiris" being the Egyptian god of the dead) reminds of the sort of titillation, sense of weight, and super-slickness that made the live-action feature a success. Directed by Andy Jones from a screenplay by Andy and Larry Wachowski, the short subject reintroduces the key settings of the Matrix-verse: the holodeck training dojo, the simulated world, and the post-apocalyptic world swarming with calamari-like sentinels. With graphics support from Square, the company responsible for the visually stunning Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, The Final Flight of the Osiris has an astonishing life to it, boding well for the integration of advanced CGI for the upcoming sequels (Matrix Reloaded in May and Matrix: Revolutions in November). Brilliantly conceived, the picture manages a level of character development and tension in eleven minutes that most features don't manage over the course of a hundred. It's a canny move to reintroduce The Matrix and its universe just prior to its sequels without resorting to extravagant re-releases (a special edition DVD was nixed at the eleventh hour for its spoilers) that too often reek of a cynical cash grab. In its tale of Asian Jue and her African-American captain Thaddeus, the picture is comfortably multi-cultural in a way that places the series as the appropriate successor to "Star Trek", while being a mature action film leavened by sexuality which, after all, is what the original film offered as well. It's the best--the only--reason to see Dreamcatcher this weekend.-WC
|
Four childhood pals (
The Body (retitled
Stand By Me for film), united by an act of kindness toward a child afflicted with Down's Syndrome (the clumsily named "Duddits"), reunite annually as adults in a hunting trip in the woods of Maine. Each gifted with a low-level telepathy, upon their twentieth year (
It) at their rustic, snowed-in (
The Shining) lodge "The Hole in the Wall," an alien spacecraft carrying a highly infectious fungus crash-lands in the woods nearby (
The Tommyknockers), causing the quartet (and Duddits) to fulfill their destinies as saviours of the world. Jonesy (Damian Lewis) is a teacher, Beav (Jason Lee) is comic relief, Henry (Thomas Jane) is a suicidal shrink, Pete (Timothy Olyphant) is an alcoholic, and Duddits (Donnie Wahlberg) is a
deus ex machina. Representing the evil military interested in cover-up are Morgan Freeman's Col. Kurtz (the connection to
Apocalypse Now is so obvious it's hardly worth pointing out) and Tom Sizemore's oddly neutered Capt. Underhill.
King's traumatic accident does go some way towards explaining the body horror of the piece--it is easily King's most scatalogically obsessed work, with explosive bowel parasites (the colourfully-named "shit weasels"), a phallic serpent armed with a vagina dentate, and one hero consumed by cancer and another by alien possession (the revolt of the physical). Beav (with a bad oral fixation) finds his moment of crisis while sitting on the toilet, Pete finds his while pissing in the snow, Henry's comes in the squishing of little sperm-like larvae, and Jonesy is the Stephen King-projection (hit by a car, hip shattered) with a serious case of existential crisis. It's Cronenberg for dummies, in other words, with the ultimate themes not of addiction and the failure of the flesh, but something along the lines of "don't mess with The Duke" (a gun once owned by John Wayne plays a central role) and, apparently, don't trust the British. It goes without saying that Dreamcatcher is scatterbrained and ridiculous.
Jettisoning much of the Christian redemption that has flavoured King's late work (not only post- but pre-accident, curiously enough), the second half of the picture deviates drastically from the second half of the novel, cleverly replacing something that doesn't work because it's boring with something that doesn't work because it's stupid. Why does an alien fern capable of shape-shifting and possessing humans need to resort to shit weasels (Alien) and evil fungi (Creepshow) of indeterminate intent? Are the shit weasels the larval incarnation of the bigger aliens instead of just phallic and sperm images of indeterminate intent? Why is the final chase conducted as a solo mission with the power of the entire United States military complex at Underhill's disposal? Does the military really believe that it can quarantine a few hundred acres of wilderness; including all of its animals? Why does the alien, which appears to be able to turn into an extremely powerful dinosaur thing at will, insist on using Jonesy's damaged body to laboriously move a pivotal manhole cover? Dreamcatcher has no internal logic, in other words, and, free of the irritating bonds of coherence, it's also free of stakes and tension.
Not helping is dialogue comprised of the sort of shorthand catch-phrase idioglossia meant to imply years of familiarity but only succeeding in making one pine for the days when Kasdan was penning (he shares a screenwriting credit here with Goldman) strong, character-driven genre pieces (The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Body Heat, Silverado) without narrative crutches and meandering shortcuts. Like the book, the film is overlong (at a slow 135 minutes) and only really engages during its prologue, providing maddening glimpses of promising storylines and character moments tossed aside in favour of being a cut-rate adaptation of a cut-rate King novel.
Looking at times like John Carpenter's The Thing (John Seale's ravishing cinematography is easily the best part of the boondoggle), Dreamcatcher feels a great deal like what it likely is: a product of a down-on-his-luck director trying to juggle material that's clearly beneath him, jettisoning any sense of rhythm and cohesion in the belief that King's massive sales represent the kind of mindless support that defeats the director's best instincts while offering him a chance to regain the keys to the executive washroom. A shame that in the forlorn search for his lost audience, Kasdan's found himself only another indiscriminate, wholly interchangeable contributor to the mainstream crapper--shit weasels and all.-Walter Chaw
As stupid as stupid can be, Lawrence Kasdan's splashy comeback on the backs of two writers who haven't really been any good for about forty years between them (Stephen King and William Goldman) is riddled with knee-slapping plot inconsistencies and the sort of dunderheaded conveniences that reek equally of desperation and a lack of respect for the audience. Based on the first King novel written after the author was smeared across a Maine highway by a man who would later kill himself in a trailer, the book is a fine short story trapped in the body of a six-hundred page book. Hopelessly protracted, after the first two-hundred pages, the novel becomes a pathetic exercise in chronic self-reference: the malady of a successful author who's begun to lose the line between reality and his cult of personality. King has become a writer interested in writing love letters to his fanbase and smug gruel for everyone else.
dvd reviews: