Dreamscape [Blu-ray] Reviews

The famous New Yorker film critic, Pauline Kael, would sometimes perplex her admirers by adopting an unlikely film. One of them was 1984's Dreamscape, which Kael dubbed a “tight little thriller”. Kael’s followers (sometimes known as “Paulettes”) were baffled. What did she see in this low-budget sci-fi movie, which the distributor (Fox) dumped into theaters in August at a time when late summer was used to clear out stale inventory?

 

Image Entertainment is releasing Dreamscape on Blu-ray with the same special features found on its 2000 DVD. It’s a safe bet that Blu-ray fans will find the disc as troubling as Kael’s readers found her review.

 

 

 

 

Alex Gardner (Dennis Quaid) was born with psychic powers, but after spending his teenage years as a test subject for Dr. Paul Novotny (Max von Sydow, classing up the whole enterprise), Alex tired of being a lab rat and bolted. Now he makes his living predicting the outcome of horse races with uncanny accuracy – a practice that has him in hot water with local track owners.

 

Novotny seeks out Alex, because his research has taken him somewhere new: dreams. With the assistance of Jane DeVries (Kate Capshaw, just before she met Indiana Jones and married Steven Spielberg), Novotny wants to insert a psychic into another person’s dream. Novotny’s interest is therapeutic; his goal is to treat people suffering from nightmares. But his funding comes from a shadowy government agency, the kind that has no name and even the CIA is afraid of, and the head of that agency has other plans. His name is Bob Blair, and he’s played by Christopher Plummer with the same charming menace that Plummer brought to Charles Muntz in Up.

 

Under pressure, Alex joins Novotny’s program. He even begins to enjoy it, when he’s able to free a kid named Buddy (Cory Yothers) from night terrors. But he also encounters a nasty rival in the person of Tommy Ray Glatman (David Patrick Kelly), whose three names are an immediate clue that he’s some form of assassin. Tommy Ray was the program’s golden boy until Alex arrived, and he doesn’t play nice. He also seems to have an unusually close relationship with Blair.

 

Alex becomes suspicious of the program when he’s approached by a writer investigating it, Charlie Prince (George Wendt, who’d only been on Cheers for one season at that point). Alex grows even more concerned when the President of the United States arrives at Novotny’s facility for treatment. It seems that the President (Eddie Albert, who was a close friend of Ronald Reagan and captures a little of his manner) has been plagued by terrifying nightmares of nuclear holocaust. These visions have persuaded him to commence immediate disarmament talks with the Soviet Union (which still existed at the time), but first the President’s old comrade, Bob Blair, has recommended a session of dream therapy. Alex doubts Blair’s motives, and so do we.

 

Dreamscape was directed by Joseph Ruben, whose credits include the original Stepfather, as well as The Good Son, Sleeping with the Enemy and the underrated True Believer. Ruben always does his best work in off-beat films with small budgets and tight narratives. When he gets more money and higher visibility, the results are usually disappointing (e.g., Money Train and The Forgotten). Ruben co-wrote the script with Chuck Russell (director of The Mask and Eraser, among others) and David Loughery, whose eclectic credits include the worst of the Trek films, The Final Frontier, and the Beyoncé vehicle, Obsessed. Among them, the writers produced an efficient script that lays out the story’s basic premises and lets the events unfold logically from there. They also knew enough to leaven the film with humor, some of it supplied by Quaid’s irreverent performance as Alex and even more at the expense of Mr. Webber (Larry Gelman), a patient at the Novotny clinic with a bad toupee and a serious case of marital insecurity.

 

The dream sequences are primitive by today’s standards, but they were elaborate for the time. To my eye, they look more like real dreams than anything that today’s CGI artisans would be likely to produce. Real dreams are hazy and fragmentary, with much left unseen, and that’s how Dreamscape presents them, due to both budgetary constraints and the limits of available miniature and optical technology. Yes, the make-up effects and puppetry often look cheesy, but so what? One of the hallmarks of a dream is that it usually doesn’t feel real.

 

What does feel real are the performances, especially by Quaid and Kelly. When Alex and Tommy Ray ultimately have their showdown (in the middle of someone else’s dream), the surroundings may be imaginary, but the fear, rivalry and homicidal mania feel plenty authentic.

 

 

 

 

Dreamscape is the kind of disc that people buy and say, “What’s so great about Blu-ray? This looks like crap!” I won’t pretend that the image on this disc is anything other than what it is: grainy, with inconsistent black levels, frequently washed-out colors and a print that shows more wear-and-tear than we’re used to seeing from contemporary productions or high-end restorations.

 

Then again, if anyone has ever seen a better presentation of this low-budget, independent film, please raise your hand. Dreamscape was an orphan project from first to last, and without Image’s efforts, there wouldn’t even be home video versions. In direct comparison to the ten-year-old DVD, the Blu-ray reveals a dramatic increase in picture resolution and a substantial improvement in color delineation and shadow detail.

 

Could it be better? There are reviewers who will happily opine on how much a Blu-ray picture could have been improved based what some other outfit (usually Criterion) accomplished with such-and-such a film from the same era. I am not one of them. If you don’t have access to the source materials (and you’re not Robert Harris), it’s presumptuous to second-guess the technical crew. Let’s assume they made the best of what they had, given the available resources.

 

 

 

 

The primary beneficiary of the DTS lossless track is Maurice Jarre’s electronic score. (The producer explains on the commentary that Jarre was hired to write an orchestral score, but persuaded the filmmakers to go with synthesizers, which was clearly the right choice.) The score gets a little more breathing room and slightly better fidelity than on the 2000 DVD, which offered both DD and DTS tracks. Otherwise, the lossless track doesn’t provide much improvement, which isn’t surprising when you consider that this is a 5.1 remix from a stereo track.

 

I am more and more convinced that Warner’s approach to Blu-rays of films from this era is the right one: do a lossless stereo track of the original mix, and otherwise leave it alone. The attempt to remix Dreamscape for discrete 5.1 produces anomalies such as the scene where Alex is talking to Novotny in his office while it’s raining outside. You’re supposed to hear the rain in the surrounds, but it sounds more like tiny flames crackling in Novotny’s office. What should be background noise has been made too prominent.

 

Generally, though, the dialogue is clear and intelligible, and there is an occasional sound effect that gets an effective extra punch, especially during the dream sequences, but Jarre’s score does most of the heavy lifting as far as the film’s mood and pacing are concerned.

 

 

 

 

Commentary by Producer Bruce Cohn Curtis, Writer David Loughery and Special Effects Artist Craig Reardon. It’s never a good sign when you can’t get most of the principals to participate in a commentary track. Speaking in 1999, Curtis, Loughery and Reardon begin by lamenting that Quaid and Capshaw declined to participate. Then they do their best to recall details about the project’s development and the shoot. Since it was an independent production, Curtis was on set more than many producers, and he has a remarkably good memory for locations and weather conditions. There are interesting stories spread throughout the track, but the director’s absence is keenly felt.

 

Photo Gallery (SD) (2:35). A series of stills that plays automatically, featuring the effects team at work in their shop.

 

Behind the Scenes (SD; 1:66:1) (2:13). Effects test footage.

 

 

 

 

The cover art for the Blu-ray replicates the original poster. Look closely, and you can see studio PR at its most duplicitous. By the time Dreamscape was released, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom had made Kate Capshaw famous; so the PR people did their best to exploit their leading lady’s new fame. That’s why Quaid is standing next to her wearing a leather jacket with a torch raised, a kid grabbing onto him, the image of a snake looming over them, and the three of them encircled by images of motorcyles and guys with guns. All of these motifs have been pulled from the film, but they’re out of context. It isn’t that kind of movie. It’s just what Pauline Kael called it: a tight little thriller.