Dreamcatcher
(2003) 134 Min.
Rated: R (Gore)
Director: Lawrence Kasdan
Stars: Morgan Freeman, Thomas Jane, Jason Lee, Damian Lewis, Timothy Olyphant
Links: IMDB | Wikipedia
Rating: ★★☆☆☆
Four psychic friends encounter an invasion by parasitic aliens.
Synopsis:
All four adult friends Henry (Jane), Jonesy (Lewis), Beaver (Lee) and Pete (Olyphant) have a form of telepathy. Jonesy gets hit by a car while crossing the street but survives. He saw a vision of his childhood friend, Duddits, beckon him to cross the street.
They guys meet up for their annual camping trip in a lodge. They talk about their memory storage warehouse in each of their minds. They all remember their special friend Duddits, Douglas Cavell.
In a flashback, the four boys walk and find boys bullying Duddits. They manage to get the bullies away from Duddits and calm him down.
Beaver and Jonesy find a man named Rick wandering through the forest and bring him to the cabin. Rick keeps belching and farting. He claims he ate some berries in the forest. Rick feels sick and the two have him lie down in a bed.
Pete and Henry are driving home. They try to go fast up a hill, but once over they see a man sitting in the middle of the road an swerve to avoid him. They crash and the car flips over. The two go back and find the woman sitting in the road covered in snow. She claims she has to find Rick. Henry goes off to find help and leaves Pete with the woman.
Beaver and Jonesy see a mass migration of animals. Some of them have red marks on them like Rick. They see helicopters with army men that warn them that the area is quarantined. They go back inside the house and find that Rick has moved to the bathroom and left a trail of blood splats. They break into the bathroom to find Rick on the toilet with blood everywhere. They touch him and he falls over dead, his butt bloody. Beaver closes the toilet lid and something inside the toilet hits the lid. Beaver sits on the toilet as the thing inside keeps hitting the lid. Jonesy goes outside to get friction tape.
Beaver keeps reaching for toothpicks he dropped. The creature escapes the toilet. It attacks Beaver. Jonesy comes back in time to see the monster attack Beaver. Jonesy closes the door and a giant alien appears. the snake-like monster slides up the alien creature like a pet. The alien leans over and it’s head explodes into a fine red mist entering Jonesy eyes, noes and mouth.
A government agency is containing the infection. They think it’s a crash landing and they’ve handled it before. They call it Ripley. Col. Abraham Curtis (Freeman) is part of Blue Unit and fighting aliens for 25 years. There’s a theory that not everyone infected with Ripley forms a worm creature inside them but Curtis won’t hear of it. He’ll stop at nothing to keep the threat contained.
Pete talks to the dying woman about how Duddits gave the four friends a psychic ability. He think Duddits isn’t from Earth and that he came to prepare them for something else. The woman dies and an eel creature comes out of her. It attacks Pete but he manages to burn it off with fire from his campfire.
Jonesy is infected but alive and drives a snowmobile. He’s fighting with the alien Mr. Gray in his head. Jonesy goes to pick up Pete, but Pete can tell that the alien is in him. He can hear the real Jonesy telling him to help the alien so he won’t be killed. Meanwhile, the real Jonesy is hiding the Memory Warehouse of his mind in a secret room with private information. The alien cannot access it.
Henry gets to the cabin, sees Beaver dead and sees the flashback of Jonesy being infected. The cabin is covered in red powder. Henry finds one of the eel creatures on the bed with a ton of eggs and he blows the large one away. He sets the cabin on fire.
Flashback to the kids using Duddits to find a girl named Josie. At this time they get their psychic ability and can communicate together without speaking. They find her in a sewage drain and save her.
Meanwhile the Blue Unit goes to destroy the ship that crashed. The helicopter pilots can hear the aliens talking in their head claiming they need help and aren’t infected. Curtis orders the men to fire, and as they’re shot the aliens turn from grays into large slug-like creatures.
Jonesy’s body kills Pete when he insults the alien. Jonesy hides in a room with information marked SSDD.
Henry gets taken to a quarantine building by the Blue Unit. Infected people are together with everyone. He talks to a man named Owen who is under Curtis. Henry tells him that Curtis has gone crazy from hunting aliens for so long. Henry also tells him that Jonesy is infected and has escaped.
Owen helps Henry escape. He reaches General Matheson who takes over the Blue Unit.
Henry explains that his friend Jonesy died when he got hit by a car, so he must’ve been changed somehow. He tells Owen they have to get to Duddits. Duddits is dying of cancer, but Henry is able to take him with them on their trip in hopes of saving the world.
Curtis is still running his operation despite being taken over by General Matheson.
Duddits tells Henry that Mr. Gray wants to get to Massachusetts to infect the Boston water supply. If Boston is infected, the whole world will be soon after.
Mr. Gray goes to the aqueduct and Owen, Duddits, and Henry are there too. Curtis is also headed there after stealing a helicopter. Mr. Gray intends to throw an infected dog into the water supply. As the dog is laid on the ground, it dies and an eel creature comes out of it. Mr. Gray tries to open a heavy manhole cover to the water below.
Owen gets shot by Curtis in his helicopter but manages to take down Curtis’ helicopter with his own gun.
Henry gets the gun from Owen, who dies, and shoots the eel creature. The worm dies but lays an egg that almost instantly hatches.
Duddits enters the room and stops Mr. Gray who comes out of Jonesy as a fine red mist. Duddits turns into another type of alien as he fights Mr. Gray. The two fight and die together. They turn into a mist that forms a dreamcatcher shape before disappearing.
The last hatchling worm inches closer to the open manhole, but Jonesy, now back to his normal self, stomps it out. Jonesy and Henry smile at each other and the film ends.
Review:
This film is kind of too many things going on at once. It’s like Stand By Me and It mixed with an alien invasion film or infection. There’s bits to like, but altogether it’s a jumbled mess. I don’t know if the original Stephen King book was like this or if it’s just the screenplay that is this bad, but King has done some bad films on his own, so one can never be too sure. There are great films based on King’s books too, but this isn’t one of them.
The scenes of Henry talking with himself are laughably bad. He takes on a faux British accent and chews the scenery. It’s too distracting. For some reason there’s a “whoosh” sound every time the character pulls on his jacket hood, too.
Freeman’s Curtis is such a superfluous character, too. He’s an army man who has seen too much and is too cold. He’s ready to kill everyone and anyone in order to be in control and maintain control. That might’ve worked if the film was just about that, but it isn’t.
Even the four main characters don’t have all that much character development and it’s only through jarring flashbacks that we see how they got to knew their super special important friend Duddits. Two of the friends die and they aren’t on screen too long to feel really bad for them.
It is a surprisingly watchable film, though, despite all those flaws and the long play time of two hours and fourteen minutes. It has just enough distraction, banter, and action to carry the film. But it doesn’t have enough to make it a good film, and I guess the only recommendation for this film I can give is if you want to see a film with eels coming out of people’s butts and a hard-boiled Morgan Freeman with a strange haircut and eyebrows.
