thomas4cinema

Lawrence Kasdan? Laurence Kasdan, whom Star Wars tie-in readers may remember… ! William “Marathon Man” Goldman’s script! Morgan Freeman, Tom Sizemore, Timothy Oliphant!! It is absolutely incredible what a big pile of talent and money can be thrown into one Golden Pot and after some months or years of boiling and stirring out comes the most dramatic cinematic failure outside the Spiderman and Pirates franchises I have encountered in a decade or more.
The film is a sensational mess. Based on one of Stephen King’s weaker books, which tries to merge a childhood reminiscence involving “special” boy Duddits (which is the book’s good part) with a horror development introducing into their hunting weekend (which is a bit gross., but fun reading) and with a queer alien invvasion story (which is rubbish) – the film now stresses the nonsense bit of the book and adds another ridiculous element, namely Morgan “I play anything for a Million Dollars” Freeman as the manic leader of some special alien hunters army squad who goes on a rampage. The interaction between the guys in the hut, the flashbacks to their youth when they met Duddits, and that Duddits himself, the boy who changes the people he encounters, who has this special air about him – all missing or so reduced that if you have not read the book, the bits about the memory storage and the Dreamweaver and the mind-reading abilities remain next to incomprehensible. I need to check the book’s ending again, maybe it’s the novel’s fault, but there are two alternative endings on the DVD and you cannot really decide which one is more rubbish.
And Roger Ebert correctly asks how those stupid teeth-monsters could ever steer a spacecraft – or build one, for that matter.