Nightmare on King Street

    There is going to come a time when the trailer to a movie is considered a far more efficient and satisfying mode of entertainment than a movie itself.  It is a given, almost an adage, that trailers- a 2 minute greatest hits medley of the very best scenes of a movie who's overall quality is still unknown- will always outstrip the movie they advertise in terms of how much enthusiasm they generate.  The release of the trailers to the last two Star Wars movies became Internet phenomenons and were always referenced to later when fans spoke later after the release of the movie as to how much was promised and how little was delivered.

    What is the point of this?  The point is that, in my opinion, Dreamcatcher had a kick-ass trailer.  Not just a good trailer, but one of the most well produced, enticing, down-right eerie trailers of any movie in the last year.  I loved the scene of animals fleeing all in one direction through a snow-covered woods.  I loved the alien-possessed Jonesy's (Damian Lewis) evil double-take.  I especially loved how it ended, with Morgan Freeman's ominous voice-over inviting, "Come with me, Owen.  I'll show you things you'll wish you'd never seen."  I could almost make shit like that an evening in itself.

    So what is Dreamcatcher in reality?  Certainly nothing close to what was promised or imagined.  It feels well-packaged as it should, considering the reputations of the people behind it.  Screenwriter William Goldman's past credits include two of the best Stephen King adaptations to date: Misery and Hearts in Atlantis.  Lawrence Kasdan, skipper of movies like The Big Chill, has his name in the hallowed halls of great directors, but, granted, he didn't get there by making movies about parasitic space worms.  However, Stephen King's pop-culture friendly stories have become such a cornerstone of both the written word and film that it seems like it is a rite of passage for even legendary filmmakers to take a crack at one of his books.  If Hitchcock were alive today I imagine his adaptation of Insomnia or Bag of Bones would be coming somewhere down the line.

    Yet, the movies that Stephen King novels have produced are most known for their ranks of failures rather than successes.  Even the arguable classic, Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, is, as even its defenders will concede, an acquired taste.  Mostly we remember Firestarter and Cujo and The Dark Half.  Granted, two of those movies were made in a period in the early 80s when adaptations of King's worked were hastily popped out like sausages, but the success of King's heftier works like The Stand and It as mini-series suggested that his style, perhaps, wasn't really right for a two or even two-and-a-half hour movie.  The leisurly pace of his stories and his colloquialism-laden narratives made them better to be stretched into six or eight hours over a period of three to four nights.  As a result, I have to agree with one critic when he said that Dreamcatcher would have worked far better as an ABC mini-series than as a two-hour feature.  Take the opening of the movie, for example.  We meet four men, Jonsey, Henry, Pete, and Beaver, all friends from childhood and share a commonality of strange psionic gifts but bleak and unrewarding futures.  However, these vignettes, so impeccably fleshed out in the novel (I'm in the process of listening to it on tape) feel truncated and rushed.  This feeling will pop up in other parts of the movie, too, such as when Henry shows up at an army quarantine base in the midst of an alien invasion and manages to get people to help him with just a few choice words.  The feeling is that good sense and smart storytelling were sacrificed in order to keep the film moving at a pace that ensured a 2-hour-plus finish line.

    The plotline of Dreamcatcher is an amalgamation of just about any hostile alien movie ever made with some gooey twists thrown in for the sake of "creativity."  The baddies conveniently spread through a red, soupy virus (nicknamed "The Ripley"), and gestate into giant turds of spit and teeth and emerge when the victim sits down to do his or her, uh, business.  They also have the ability to possess a person's body, which is always effective for playing on that Body Snatchers paranoia of wondering if key characters are really friend or foe.  The most amusing thing about these alien constructs is how overwrought they can get.  I never understood in the Alien movies how a species of creature could survive if it depended on hosts in order to reproduce one at a time.  In Dreamcatcher, the life cycle of the "shit weasels" (the movie's term, not mine) doesn't make much sense, either.  We see that they can reproduce by laying eggs, which is fine, but if that is the case why do they find the need to play command and conquer with some poor sap's digestive tract?

     Dreamcatcher moves too fast to worry about questions like that, which is probably one of its bright spots.  It is never boring.  However, it is never really satisfying, either.  The characters are mostly cardboard cutouts.  Morgan Freeman (what's with those eyebrows, dude?) plays a hard-assed military commander/alien hunter who is ready to slaughter every human and animal in the woods to stop the alien infection from spreading.  Freeman is one of those uber-dependable actors who could lend credibility to a 10-10-220 commercial, but here he is wasted.  Even the four friends don't show much depth.  It is obvious from the beginning that some are meant to be the explain-all for everything that is going on and others are the designated Alien Chow for the movie.  The one character who gets the most spotlight is Jonsey, a college professor recovering from a near-fatal accident who is "hijacked" by an alien presence (who speaks with a British accent!) and watches the horror unfold from his mental "memory warehouse"- a polished storeroom of boxed memories with labels like "broken promises."

    Kasdan brings some creative twists to this (the afore mentioned memory warehouse is one of my favorites) but Dreamcatcher is too trapped by the confines of its story and its medium to even evolve into something akin of a guilty pleasure.  There is just far too much work here for too little result.  And then, there is that ending.  Oh, don't get me started on the ending.  Even if you could be kind enough to dub the majority of Dreamcatcher as confidently built, the last fifteen minutes of the movie turns extremely, extremely stupid as the fate of the world hangs in the balance, a secret about a special friend is revealed, and the movie doesn't end as much as it just stops.  Maybe Kasdan had enough faith in his audience that he didn't figure he needed more to explain what happened, but explanations aren't the problem.  All else being equal, an ending this bad needed to be fixed before it got to the cameras.  What we are left with is a piece of story that feels like it would belong more with the outtakes during the ending credits, at the end of which someone would let the audience off the hook and shout "just kidding!"  C