Dreamcatcher (2003)

[Mark Pfeiffer]

Title: Dreamcatcher

Tagline: Four friends hung a dreamcatcher in their cabin. It's about to catch something it cannot stop.

Genre: Drama, Horror, Science Fiction, Thriller

Director: Lawrence Kasdan

Cast: Morgan Freeman, Thomas Jane, Jason Lee, Damian Lewis, Timothy Olyphant, Tom Sizemore, Donnie Wahlberg, Mikey Holekamp, Reece Thompson, Giacomo Baessato, Joel Palmer, Andrew Robb, Rosemary Dunsmore, Michael O'Neill, Eric Keenleyside, C. Ernst Harth, Michael Dobson, Ty Olsson, Michael Daingerfield, Campbell Lane, Ingrid Kavelaars, Darrin Klimek, Bailee Reid, Kevan Ohtsji, Marcy Goldberg, Dion Johnstone, Shauna Kain, Colin Lawrence, Jordan Walker, Jonathan Kasdan, Carolyn Tweedle

Release: 2003-03-21

Runtime: 136

Plot: Four boyhood pals perform a heroic act and are changed by the powers they gain in return. Years later, on a hunting trip in the Maine woods, they're overtaken by a vicious blizzard that harbors an ominous presence. Challenged to stop an alien force, the friends must first prevent the slaughter of innocent civilians by a military vigilante ... and then overcome a threat to the bond that unites the four of them.

I'm still mulling over this one, but my initial impression is that Dreamcatcher is a mess. I wasn't bored with it, but it doesn't all come together. I haven't read King's book but the more scatalogical elements (in dialogue, in the plot) remain intact. I admire Kasdan as a director, but my lingering feeling is that he may not have been the right guy for the job. I found it disappointing, but like I said, I'm still reflecting on it.

FWIW, Final Flight of the Osiris from The Animatrix played after the film. Pretty stunning. The CGI animation is fantastic.

Oh, and the new T3 trailer should be attached to prints too.

 

[Troy LaMont]

is that Dreamcatcher is a mess...

That, unfortunately, seems to be the initial consensus.

I too was looking forward to this, but I'll still see it.

Troy

 

[MatS]

well like I said "King adaptations can be either brilliant or brutal in their execution" seems as if this appears to be the later

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/Dreamcatcher-1120951/
:frowning:

 

[Malcolm R]

From the Variety review:

"This overlong and unwieldy grab-bag of vintage monster-movie elements starts intriguingly as a snowbound deep-woods chiller, but gradually dissolves into a mess of other-worldly invasion and military counter-offensive."

That sums up exactly what I thought of the book. I liked the beginning, but lost interest about half-way through. Sounds like the movie is faithful. :frowning:

 

[David Forbes]

The book absolutely sucked. It's one of King's worst. I never understood the love for the book, and even with the talent involved in the movie I couldn't see how it wouldn't be a disaster unless they basically rewrote the thing from start to finish.

From what I've heard, they kept all the bad and stupid stuff in and rewrote the end to make that even more awful.

For those who read the book and don't care to be spoiled about the end of the movie, read below:

DUDDITS IS A FREAKIN' ALIEN!

 

[Mark Palermo]

I thought the first half of the movie was really good. But once they step outside, the screenplay just turns into a convoluted mess. There's too much going on for a two-hour movie. It should have been a miniseries.

Mark

 

[Carlo_M]

It should have been a miniseries

Yikes, that was what I feared. I wondered how a 600+ page book could be brought onscreen in 2:15. Oh well, I'll still see it because I'm a King junkie.

[Flame Suit On]"It should have been a miniseries" - I also thought that about Lord of the Rings[/Flame Suit Off]

 

[David Forbes]

A miniseries of this book would just prolong the pain. It was a terrible, terrible read. And I am usually a King fan.

 

[Eric Emma]

It jumped from 10% to 22% on the scale!

 

[Alex Spindler]

So it went from horrible to crappy?

 

[Jeff Adams]

Thats too bad about this. I have been looking forward to this movie for a very long time. Oh well, I'll still check it out tomorrow night.

 

[MatS]

So it went from horrible to crappy?

no pun intended, right?

 

[Steve_Tk]

Well. I'll give the first half of the movie a solid score.

I was intrigued to find out what's going on. When the animals were running was cool also. Right up until...you see the alien come out of the toilet, then you see the large alien


It was suspenseful, up until this point. It would have been like Jaws just coming out and showing the shark in the first 10 minutes of the movie. By the end you would be like "yeh I've seen the shark 100 times already".

That whole scene with the toilet man was pretty great, suspensefull, and tense. Then it just lays all the cards on the table. After that there is no suspense, no tense feeling, just aliens crawling everywhere, and you are no longer scared of them

Also, ILM should be ashamed of this. The CGI was terrible.

At first I thought I might try the book, hoping that it just had a bad adaptation. But now that I think about it, the whole story seems kinda silly and dumb.

 

[Bill J]

I just saw this film and was severely disappointed. It did a horrible job of pulling things together.

One thing that confused me:
If all of the animals were infected, then couldn't the "virus" have easily spread, since there is no possible way that the military could confine them all in the quarantined area?

 

[Chris Clark]

Sadly, I'm going to have to agree with the negative comments about the film. I was hyped about this film from the first trailer, and those expectations imploded as the film unspooled. If the Animatrix short had not appeared before the film, I think the poor ticket cashiers would have faced the full force of my disappointment.
At least WB didn't try to tack the short to the end of the film. That would have been pure marketing evil.

 

[James T]

I saw this, and I jokingly told my friends, we should leave right after we saw the Animatrix movie.

Did anyone catch what Morgan Freeman said in the chopper during the spaceship attack?
. All I caught was something about kicking ass. It seemed like something Ash would say, but I didn't quite hear it since the chopper was too loud.

Also, was this movie suppose to be scary? They had all the tense music and stuff you see from 80s horror films where you know something's going to happen and does, but this movie was never scary.

Bill, I never tought of that until you brought it up. ground can be controlled, but not airborne.

And one last thing, what were Morgan Freeman, Jason Lee and Tom Sizemore thinking when they signed on for this?

 

[Steve_Tk]

Also. I just saw a Trailer that says "everything on earth knows they are comming, humans will be the last to know".

But We find out that humans have been fighting aliens for 30 years.


They never said what happened to all those people in the camp that were infected


and also, probably the largest grip for me Duddits. Ok this guy not only turns into some sphynx/ox alien, but he comes to earth a long time ago, gives some nice guys some powers, but he can tell the future??? He knew this was going to happen, at that point I gave up on the story. Especially sinse nothing was explained. We just have to accept that morgan freeman is crazy. Crazy enough that when one little thing doesn't go his way, instead of trying to save the world, he just tries to kill one man because he is mad at him.

 

[Adam_S]

huh?

I liked the movie, and enjoyed it quite a lot, I had two major disapointments, one that they showed us the shit weasal very quickly, but I got over that. I never notice if effects are bad because I don't have a freeze frame mind where I can take pictures and analyze them in magnified detail to see if they correctly used bump-mapping on the textures and proper reflection effects. I thought they were pretty good the shit weasals were slimy and disgusting, I didn't want to look at them. I'd have preferred keeping the shit weasals a secret, but I think it would have worked against the film ala Signs to do that differently because it would only have been disapointing.

Second major disapointment was that Dudditts turned out to be an alien, which made no sense whatsoever, and was extremely annoying.


I loved how they did the scenes of Jonesie's interaction with the alien and watching his own body.

Best part of the movie was the flashbacks and the first parts, the second parts were okay, but didn't live up to the first. I was surprised Jonesie lived, since I expected him to be killed by his buddy (logical sense because Jonesie had already died).

I was quite entertained, but was the only one in my group that was, my girlfriend was seriously disturbed by the gore (and she loved Dead-Alive, totally unaffected) but then the gore is deliberately meant to get at you; the other is a big King fan and had read the book and seemed to think it was like Hearts in Atlantis--all the problems are in the script because Goldman sucked out all the elements that made it a compelling story in order to make it more filmic.

I was going to give this three stars, but I think it's more of a 2.5 star film--highly recommended with reservations--because in the end it's nothing more than a very well done thriller, but what makes King stories so wonderful is they take the vehicle of the thriller and tell us something about the human condition, something very absent from the film (I blame Goldman once again, who turned Low Men in Yellow Coats into a rewrite of My Girl).

Adam

 

[LennyP]

Be warned that this post contains some descriptions, they're not really spoilers, but the trailer was so well done it didn't say anything, though you should be aware that it's about aliens, and there isn't anything here you won't read elsewhere. If you're avoiding anything about a movie you're determined to see without knowing anything about it, then don't read.

Do you know how WB adjusts their logo to fit with the movie's style, etc, well when the trailers were over and Dreamcatcher was to begin, I see this altered WB intro and think that this green version and the music feels familiar, then I realized it's the Matrix WB intro! For half a second I thought, was it the wrong reel, but then I remembered that one of the Animatrix shorts was to be attached to the beggining of Dreamcatcher in theaters! I immediately got excited. This episode is completely in CGI, the kind Pixar and others with their Toy, Bug, Ice, and Monsters only wish they had, it is the Square USA's Final Fantasy style animation, perfected even further, looking very realistic.
It opens inside a simulator with an Asian woman and a black man, blindfolded, fighting with katanas, for 3 or 4 mins, at least it seemed that long, gradually cutting and ripping each other's clothes off, looking all sexy. :dork: Then the sentinels, I think they're called unless I'm confusing them, those flying things with metal tentacles attack, and after a shootout and escape they see something really cool that I won't spoil, it all ends on a sad note as the title suggests, really awesome animation and story written by the Wachowski brothers.
Then another altered WB logo shows up, this one with snow, and Dreamcatcher finaly starts. Only I couldn't get into it after such an episode, it practically almost killed the movie that follows it. Maybe it's just me, I don't like watching one thing right after another.

The first part of the movie is very suspensful, then it turns into a Half Life situation in the woods. Let me just say that the trailer for it was very well done, I saw the first version of it about half a year ago and immediately wanted to see the film. I loved those foreshadowing serious voice over powerful imagery, beautifuly edited, and that guy standing, bloody bath behind, trembling, looking at something, saying "What do you want?". It also didn't show anything. The movie delivers on some of the things that flashed through the trailer, on others it doesn't.
Laurence Kasdan I think said in an interview that he doesn't believe that what you don't see is scarier and that you'll see aliens and monsters in this one, that it's a real creature feature. And we do. Once we do however, the film kind steps into a different gear.
The story jumps back and forth between differen time and storylines and themes that it makes sure it loses majority of general audience by time first 20 mins are over. Then those like me that stayed with the movie are not rewarded.
Ever since the first scene, everyone is either weird, or crazy, or both. There are a lot of strangely funny and kind of over the top scenes, only they're not, they fall somewhere in between without satisfying either kind of audience.
Ok, so you got your Half Life thing going, you show us all and every alien and monster every time, now we want to see them blown away! You got a whole special army unit that deals with these aliens for 25 years, you got a quarantine zone, yet there is no action. This movie doesn't know what it is, and what it's trying to be. Is it a character driven telepath drama? Is it an alien invasion army quarantine crisis? Is it a creature feature actioner? It tries to handle everything without succeeding in any of the genres. It's not an action movie. It's not gory. It's not overly dramatic, it's not scary except for a few creepy scenes.
If you're making an R rated flipped out, strange crazy alien body snatchers feature creature that come out of farting and burping asses, then you're making it for a niche audience. So give us what we want! Where is the gore? Where are bleeping aliens getting blown away? Well, there is one nice annihilation scene with a rather sad undertone that I liked, but it's very brief and CGI is not that good. Where is genocide in a quarantine camp? If you're gona set up a 25 year hunting partialy crazy but with good intentions army leader and a nazi-style camp full of infected people, then execute some, show us some innocent people get killed, give the movie a serious tone and some balls for chrissakes! It has so much potential and the boundaries of every genre tackled here, as well as the borders of what can be in an R picture are so far away you could do so much, yet nothing is done.
I'm not saying I know anything about filmmaking but if I was on the set and had some influence, I'd have made this movie a whole lot better just by talking to the producer.
I'm dissapointed as you can see but I've hyped myself up too much, assuming this'll be one of the best movies of 2003, and it is so far out of the 12 weeks, almost everything else released these first months is so crappy.
If you're curious, go see it, because it's a fun, off-beat thriller that has some very well executed scenes and it had me glued throughout and almost biting my nails.

Top 10 of 2003 so far:

1. Dark Blue
2. ?
3. ?
4. ?
5. Laurel Canyon
6. ?
7. Dreamcatcher
8. Tears of the Sun
9. The Hunted
10. Cradle 2 the Grave[/list=1]
    
    Movies avoided this week and therefore consider to be crappy:
    Agent Cody Banks
    Boat Trip (Poor Oscar winner Cuba Gooding Jr.)
    Piglet's Big Movie (more like Piglet's Shortest Ass Cashin at 75mins)
    View from the Top (Might check out on DVD)

 

[Robert Crawford]

This thread is now designated the Official Discussion Thread for "Dreamcatcher" please, post all comments, links to outside reviews, film and box office discussion items to this thread.

All HTF member film reviews of "Dreamcatcher" should be posted to the Official Review Thread.

Thank you for your consideration in this matter.


Crawdaddy