DREAMCATCHER (2003) It's bad Stephen King, made worse Dreamcatcher is, essentially, beautifully-shot garbage. It's a really shitty alien-invasion movie with a psychic-link angle and a lot of showily bad dialogue from characters we soon see have been using the same slang for twenty years. But it looks great. Stephen King's book is the most recent of his I've read; I haven't specifically lost interest in his books - I still love the guy's writing, I can blaze through even his thickest books in days - but any kind of books needs a time of absence to seem fresh to me again, and right now, I'm just not reading a lot of King. Doesn't help that this book wasn't very good either. It's better than his other alien-invasion book (The Tommyknockers, horrible), but that isn't saying much. The movie is pretty faithful to the book, up to a point; that point would be about where the retarded Duddits (Donnie Wahlberg) is brought into the story to fix everything. The movie is stronger earlier on, and shows some potential for a while with its four adults (Jason Lee, Thomas Jane, Damian Lewis and Timothy Olyphant), blessed by childhood friend Duddits with mild telepathy, which we see made use of in their four introductory scenes, with increasing impressiveness. They go away for the weekend at a hunting lodge and very soon the entire area is quarantined and every animal in the forest is running in the same direction. Not a good start to the weekend. The men are separated into two pairs, and each come across a person with red, moldy shit all over their bodies, people they try to help only to find that they blast a vicious slug out of their asses, referred to once here (many times in the book) as "shit-weasels". Most disgusting bathroom scene since Candyman, at least. Lee spends this scene sitting on the toilet trying to keep what's in there from getting out. This is the first scene he does without a toothpick in his mouth, and I suppose it's a testament to his need for a toothpick that he keeps trying to pick one up from one of the only spots on the floor that isn't covered in blood, shit, or bloody shit. I could understand if he was a hard-core smoker reaching for a match to light his cigarette, or even if he was reaching for a cigarette, though it'd still be gross that he'd put it in his mouth. But a toothpick? Considering the terror in which he regards what's in the toilet, this scene is way too silly to be believable and ends up just being gross. Meanwhile, a special section of the Army - which has apparently been fending off alien invasions for twenty-five years - is in charge of the quarantine, as well as destroying the crashed alien ship. Hundreds of people are rounded up for planned execution and a huge area in Maine is blocked off; how many times can this happen in twenty-five years and remain a secret, and what happens when the aliens land outside of the US? This unit is headed by Morgan Freeman, whose casting made me chuckle when I'd heard about it. This character in the book was a mad dog, not something one expects Freeman - who's built his career on playing variants of the same calm, reassuring, gently authoritative character - to be ideally suited for. I suppose he does fine, though it's a weak role that ultimately gets resolved in one of the dumbest shootouts (both in execution and motivation) I've seen since Deadly Reactor. His second in command is played by Tom Sizemore, who comes over to the foursome's side very quickly with a demonstration of their telepathy. The psychic angle isn't explored much; actually all that's really done with it in the movie is to win over Sizemore and to allow for a couple of conversations between people who would simply have cell phones in a better movie. Duddits, who gave them their powers in the first place, is brought in at the end to single-handedly stave off the alien menace on his own. I don't like psychic links, and I don't like rose-tinted simplistic notions of retarded people as big children with hearts of gold and cute speech impediments. Duddits is dying of leukemia, because why else would his mom let him go out into extreme danger with his friends if not because he's gonna die anyway? The best idea from the book is kept, for a while anyway. Damian Lewis gets semi-possessed by an alien intelligence, who communicates with him as he'd expect it to ("like a James Bond villain"), while he holes up in an office in his memories, able to venture out into the "memory warehouse" to retrieve some vital files when the alien's distracted. I like peeks into people's heads. If there's any reason to see Dreamcatcher, it's for all that snow. I have long lamented Hollywood's reluctance to set movies in the snow; while I concede that it's hard to work in there (those lights are hot, and it's hard to make believable fake snow that won't melt) it's still mostly because American audiences generally like cold weather so little they can't even bear to look at it. But if you can bear it, it looks as beautiful here as in any movie I've seen. The aliens ain't so beautiful; they look slimy and gross, but not exactly believable as a technologically advanced species. There's something unsettling in a "vagina with teeth" way about their vertical mouths. Too bad all that lovely snow is wasted with such a crappy movie. At well over two hours, this is the biggest ass-number I've endured in years. I would only recommend this if you plan on having surgery on your ass. BACK TO THE D's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE