Review
DREAMCATCHER
Starring Morgan Freeman, Jason Lee and Timothy Olyphant
Directed by Lawrence Kasdan
Written by Stephen King, William Goldman and Lawrence Kasdan
If a horror movie can earn kudos for making you nauseous, then Dreamcatcher deserves a standing ovation. Traversing the icky, gooey territory of angry extra-terrestrials and wedding it to the intricacies of human gastroenterology (yummy), the latest Stephen King adaptation delivers material more worthy of a gag reflex than a serious scare.
Set in the familiar King territory of rural Maine, Dreamcatcher follows a reunion of four friends that spirals into a gory alien invasion. An unsteady professor (Damian Lewis), suicidal shrink (Thomas Jane), hard-drinking car salesman (Timothy Olyphant) and wise-cracking loser (Jason Lee) get together for their annual hunting retreat in the deep north woods of New England. Bound together and haunted by their strange psychic powers, they reminisce about old times and the strange boy who changed them all.
The men now find themselves at the centre of a horrifying tragedy. After discovering a sickly hunter wandering in the woods, the men take him in only to find that he’s been infected with a lethal parasite the army has dubbed "The Ripley," which is appropriate given its similarity to the extra-terrestrial creature in Alien. Quarantined by an insane military chief (Morgan Freeman) who has spent a lifetime fighting said extra-terrestrials, the men slowly begin to sense the danger they’re in.
Following too many fractured storylines and about 45 minutes too long, this simple yarn tries and fails to turn King’s B-grade "little green men" tale into an intelligent, nuanced story about the fears without and within. Too bad director Lawrence Kasdan (Mumford) didn’t make the film into the only logical thing it could have been: a campy horror flick.
In the end, "The Ripley" leaves us thinking only of Dreamcatcher’s similarity to Alien, a classic sci-fi film that did all this so much better. |
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