Rating summary

Movie		2.0
Video		4.5
Audio		4.5
Extras		3.0
Overall		3.0

Dreamcatcher Blu-ray Movie Review

The Impossible Dream

Reviewed by Michael Reuben September 15, 2014

Stephen King liked the movie that director Lawrence Kasdan made from his novel Dreamcatcher, but he was one of the few. Despite a screenplay co-authored with Kasdan by the legendary William Goldman and an array of talent both in front of and behind the camera, the $68 million production quickly acquired bad buzz as a film in trouble. When it opened in March 2003, the reviews were dreadful and word-of-mouth was worse. Dreamcatcher earned less than $34 million domestically, although foreign sales raised that total to nearly $76 million. With video and other ancillary revenues, Warner Brothers made back its money, but Kasdan's career has never recovered. He did not make another film until 2012's modestly budgeted independent, Darling Companion.

Dreamcatcher has its fans, but time has not revealed an unjustly criticized masterpiece or even a good film. King wrote the novel while recovering from the June 1999 car accident that nearly cost him his life. Although he sometimes describes the book as just a story about four friends, in fact Dreamcatcher is dense and complex in the deceptively simple style that has made King such a durable author. The best film adaptations of his works have often been the least faithful, where a director chooses to pursue specific elements and either downplay the rest or jettison them altogether (think of Kubrick's The Shining). But Kasdan added back elements that Goldman left out of the screenplay for Dreamcatcher, and he tries to cover too much, giving it all equal weight, so that the film gets bogged down with exposition, much of which gets rushed. The result is a film that feels like pieces of different movies stitched together, as if competing versions of the script had been randomly shuffled.

There are two essential plot lines in Dreamcatcher, a point of which Kasdan was well aware, as his comments in the extras confirm. The challenge, at which Kasdan struggles mightily, is to tell them simultaneously so that they combine in a way that feels natural and organic. But how is that possible, when it takes almost 90 minutes for all the essential information to be fully deployed (and even then, there are some big loose ends)? For the sake of avoiding major spoilers, I have omitted specific examples of certain events I consider extraneous, but it's impossible to discuss the film without revealing a few basics; so anyone who wishes to experience the film "cold" should stop reading now.

One of the film's two essential stories is the relationship among four friends from Derry, Maine, who are taking their twentieth annual hunting trip to a remote cabin in the northern woods. The four are Henry (Thomas Jane), a shrink; Beaver (Jason Lee), a carpenter; Jonesy (Damian Lewis), a college history professor; and Pete (Timothy Olyphant), a car salesman. In addition to being childhood friends, the four share a special bond ever since the day they saved a mentally challenged boy, Douglas "Duddits" Cavell (Donnie Wahlberg), from bullies. (Child actors play all five characters in flashbacks.) Duddits became their friend and, in a development that none of them seem to question, gave them the gift of telepathy (among other things). Now, when the four friends gather every year, they toast their absent comrade. (They had originally planned to visit Duddits six months before this year's outing, but developments best left for the reader to discover intervened.) As boys in school, they each made a Native American charm known as a "dreamcatcher", and Duddits arranged all of their projects in a group collage, with his in the middle. Now it hangs in their cabin.

This particular year, though, the group encounters something new, in the form of an alien invasion—the film's second major plot line. The first sign appears when a man, Rick McCarthy (Eric Keenleyside), stumbles out of the forest with a red rash on his face and a distended chest, saying he's been lost in the woods and ate berries that made him sick. With Henry and Pete in town acquiring supplies, Jonesy and Beaver try to help the unfortunate fellow and soon find themselves battling the creature that has been gestating inside him. (I'll let new viewers discover the gory details for themselves.) Driving back from town, Henry and Pete find another victim in the road and confront a similar situation. As with most alien invasions, world domination is the goal, but the worm-like creatures that the four friends first confront are only harbingers. The real threat, whom they dub "Mr. Grey", proceeds with much greater stealth, and it takes all of the special abilities that the friends acquired from Duddits to battle against him.

All of this would be quite enough for one movie, but Kasdan takes on even more. In what becomes virtually a third plot line, the U.S. military has deployed a top secret unit to combat the alien threat, which, as we learn, is not the first such occurrence. The commander is Col. Abraham Curtis (Morgan Freeman), whose standard operating procedure is to quarantine the area and eliminate both the aliens' presence and anyone exposed to them. Questions have been raised by his superiors in Washington about the need for such drastic measures, but Curtis tells his subordinate and future replacement, known only as "Owen" (Tom Sizemore), that the desk jockeys are being soft. Curtis' idea of discipline is demonstrated when he shoots an erring subordinate in the hand.

As Dreamcatcher leaps back and forth among the mystical backstory of the four friends, the cloudy details of the alien invasion and the megalomania of Col. Curtis (who was named "Kurtz" in King's novel), the story becomes as messy as the bathroom where Jonesy and Beaver find Rick McCarthy's body after the alien has finished using it. As soon as any tension or suspense begins to build from the creature-feature storyline, we're suddenly dropped back into the battle of wills between Curtis and Owen, which feels like a different movie—and just when that begins to go somewhere, it's back to the aliens, or maybe into the past for another visit with Duddits. Editors Carol Littleton (E.T.) and Raul Davolos (The Way) have done the best they can with individual sequences, but the most skilled editor in the world can't prop up a structure whose narrative foundation is so badly fractured. By the time Dreamcatcher reachs its grand effects-laden finale, you can be impressed by the wizardry, but you've lost any emotional connection with the events.

Dreamcatcher Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Dreamcatcher was shot on film by Oscar winning cinematographer John Seale (The English Patient), who is currently completing post-production on Mad Max: Fury Road. Digital intermediates were not yet standard practice, and the film was finished photochemically. Seale's lighting carefully contrasts the cold blues and grays of the present-day scenes in Northern Maine with the warmer tones of the childhood flashbacks.

Ironically for such a poorly regarded catalog title, Warner has done a particularly fine job with this 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray. Sharpness and detail are very good, albeit more so in the live-action shots than in the CG effects (which merely reflects the limitations of 2003 technology), and the grain structure has the kind of fine and natural quality throughout the film that one hopes for but rarely sees on such a consistent basis. Black levels are excellent throughout, as is contrast and shadow detail. Perhaps most striking is the bitrate. Having bowed to the inevitable and placed a 134-minute film with substantial supplements on a BD-50, Warner Home Video has actually used most of the available space to deliver an average rate of 29.99 Mbps, which is atypical for WHV (although not for the Warner Archive Program, which is operated by a different team). The result is not only an absence of artifacts, but one of the best images seen on a Warner catalog title in some time.

Dreamcatcher Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Dreamcatcher's 5.1 audio mix, encoded on Blu-ray in lossless DTS-HD MA, provides all the sonic assault you could ask from a creature feature / action movie / supernatural buddy film. The worm-like creatures emit various slithery and snarling sounds, and do even worse as they make their way through human hosts while gestating. The larger alien life form represented by "Mr. Grey" has a subtler audio range, but it's distinctive and creepy. Col. Curtis' military unit brings with it the familiar sounds of warfare—heavy artillery, helicopters, armored transports—and these are delivered with solid force and impact, especially during an all-out aerial assault on the alien creatures. The harsh weather conditions of Northern Maine, especially after a winter storm settles in, provide an appropriate soundscape for Dreamcatcher's bleak tale, and several vehicular mishaps that result sound frighteningly real. In general, this is a well-mixed and involving track with good dynamic range, solid bass extension (where needed) and careful balance that never overwhelms the dialogue. The score by James Newton Howard (Kasdan's usual musical interpreter) blends neatly into the mix; as Howard notes in the extras, he used more electronic elements than usual for him, in an effort to blur the boundaries between sound effects and underscoring.

Dreamcatcher Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The extras have been ported over from Warner's 2003 DVD of Dreamcatcher.

• DreamWriter—An Interview with Stephen King (480i; 1.33:1; 7:28): King discusses the accident in which he was run down by a van and the writing of Dreamcatcher during his recovery. The interview was done immediately after King viewed a rough cut of the film.



• DreamMakers—A Journey Through the Production (480i; 1.33:1; 18:54): As the title suggests, this featurette provides an overview of the film's production, including editing, sound design and scoring.



• DreamWeavers—The Visual Effects of Dreamcatcher (480i; 1.33:1; 8:15): Visual effects producer Jeff Olson, effects supervisor Stefan Fangmeier and other members of the effects team discuss the interactions between practical and CG techniques used for the film.



• Dreamcatcher: Unraveling the Nightmare (480i; 1.33:1; 17:03): This HBO "First Look" is promotional in nature but still has worthwhile interviews.



• Lifted Scenes (480i; 2.35:1; 18:32): A "play all" function is included. The most important scene is the original ending, which deliberately left certain points about Duddits unresolved.
• Meeting Josie
• Henry Returns to the Loggers' Shelter
• Colonel Curtis Takes Off
• One Worm Kills
• Making a Dreamcatcher
• The Colonel's Descent
• Original Ending



• Teaser Trailer (480i; 2.35:1, enhanced; 2:29): "There are those who believe your dreams have great power." If the power of dreams ever had any part in the story, that element had been eliminated by the time the film was released.

Dreamcatcher Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

The Blu-ray of Dreamcatcher has already been discounted to a bargain price; so the curious may want to experience it just to see how so many talented people can work so hard to produce such a misfire. It's hard to make a good movie under any circumstances, but it's especially so when the director and the material are mismatched. Kasdan was clearly most comfortable with the scenes of character interaction, but Dreamcatcher needed the crass showman of the movie producer played by Steve Martin in Kasdan's Grand Canyon, who asked his editors, in all seriousness, "Where's the money shot? The viscera on the visor?" Kasdan wrote that character as a parody, but you need to be him if you want to make an effective creature feature. Recommended as a Blu-ray; whether you want to spend your time and money on the film is up to you.