Dreamcatcher (2003)

Dreamcatcher arrives from 2003, a year when a Stephen King adaptation could still be a $68 million studio gamble and a career wound for its director. Lawrence Kasdan's film concerns four Maine men bound since childhood by a psychic link, a hunting trip, and a great deal of extruded alien biomass. It is a creature feature with literary pretensions and a running time that outlasts its welcome. On the matter of modern social consciousness, the film is a clean sheet. Race goes unmentioned. Class goes unmentioned. The environment is a snowstorm, not a cause. The villains are rogue military men, not shareholders, so there is no economic grievance to nurse. Women appear chiefly as frostbitten corpses and the occasional screaming bystander, which is not a feminist position so much as an absence of one.

The one area where the film brushes against contemporary sensibilities is Duddits, the developmentally disabled friend whose telepathic gifts save the world. He is played by Donnie Wahlberg under prosthetics and a speech impediment, and he is dying of leukemia, and he transforms into a non-human thing and explodes into red dust shaped like a dreamcatcher. This is the magical disabled person, rendered in the bluntest possible terms. The film grants him power while denying him interiority. It is not affirming. It is 2001's idea of a plot device.

Elsewhere there is nothing to report. No LGBTQ presence, no body-positivity (the body here is a vessel for worms and is punished accordingly), no sermonizing of any kind. Ebert called it a monster movie of stunning awfulness. King called it one of the very good adaptations. Both men were, in their way, correct.