wenty years ago, four friends in small-town Maine helped out an odd kid named Duddits. Now grown, the friends—Jonesy (Lewis), Henry (Jane), Pete (Timothy Olyphant) and Beaver (Lee)—find themselves linked in a way they don't quite understand.
Each year, the group heads to a small cabin in the backwoods to drink, hunt and remember. This year, they are especially grateful to share the time with Jonesy, who is recovering from an auto accident in which he almost died.
But something's strange about the woods this year. A blizzard is moving in. Henry and Pete head to town for supplies. While they're away, Jonesy takes in a disoriented hunter who has been wandering alone in the woods. He has a red blotchy patch on his face and noxious intestinal problems.
Then Jonesy and Beaver watch from the cabin as animals take flight from the forest. Overhead, a flight of military helicopters appears, announcing over loudspeakers that the entire forest is quarantined.
Pete and Henry, meanwhile, are zooming back from town on snow-covered roads when they come upon a woman seated squarely in the road. Swerving violently to avoid her, they overturn their truck, narrowly escaping with their lives. Henry builds a fire and tells Pete to wait in the woods with the woman while he heads back to the cabin on foot.
The top-secret Blue Unit military group, meanwhile, has set up camp nearby. Col. Abraham Curtis (Freeman) has recruited a new protégé, Owen Underhill (Sizemore), whom he is training in their mission: to stop an alien threat that has descended on the woods.
Jonesy, meanwhile, has made a horrible discovery involving Beaver and an alien. Henry finds himself in confrontation with Curtis. And the friends eventually come to realize that their fates still hinge on the mysterious character of a now-adult Duddits (Donnie Wahlberg).
This dreamcatcher unravels quickly
There's an unwritten rule about movies adapted from Stephen King stories: The simpler, the better. The best King adaptations—Carrie, Stand by Me, The Green Mile—have relatively simple, mythic storylines with great emotional resonance. Filmmakers, and King himself, seem to get into trouble when the stories lose track of themselves in elaborate mythology or convoluted narratives.
Dreamcatcher, from King's best-selling 2001 novel, isn't simple. Like other King stories, it starts with a core group of characters. Over this, the film quickly layers on a portentous auto accident (King wrote the book shortly after his own near-fatal 1999 accident), telepathic links, a mystical backstory, deep-woods horror, UFOs, top-secret military commando units, renegade officers, alien possession and on and on. It isn't long before the movie, like an unstrung Native American artifact, unravels from its own weight.
It's too bad, too, as Kasdan and Goldman (the longtime King adapter and screenwriter of Misery) at first seem to have a good grasp on the four key characters and their quirky interchanges, which sound very King-like. Kasdan, best known for directing intimate dramas like The Big Chill and Grand Canyon, also finds unusual ways to depict the odd story's elements, particularly Jonesy's internal dialogues with his alien abductor. And he seems to work well with his excellent cast. The actors, particularly Lee and Band of Brothers's Lewis, are engaging and believable in extraordinary circumstances. The child actors who play the younger versions of Lewis et al. are also terrific.
But Kasdan has made some odd choices in structuring his narrative, with flashbacks interrupting the story at strange moments. Moreover, and perhaps overwhelmed with the chance finally to play with big-budget movie toys, Kasdan allows his movie to get away from him.
Starting with an overblown helicopter gunship attack sequence, Dreamcatcher rapidly falls victim to its own high concept and visual effects, losing track of the charm that lures audience members into that backwoods cabin in the first place.
