Lathe of Heaven

This new version leaves the relation between George and Haber obscure, leaves out the Aliens, and hence the philosophical point of the book, and adds a tawdry romance between George and Heather. Instead of coming to love each other through their adventures, Heather falls for about as cheesy a pick-up line as I've heard of: "I knew you in a former reality, or in a dream." The transformations of Penny are unnecessary and unattractive. Is Manny supposed to be George's guardian angel or something? This would not need to be explained, but should have been dealt with further.

Anyone who wants to experience this story should read the book, which is considerably better even than the 1980 film version.

PBS in San Francisco broadcast the original every night for a week in, I believe 1978, and I'm old enough to have taped it on my newly invented, right-out-of-the-box, VHS recorder. I still have that well-used tape and still drag it out to watch every few years. What made the original so compelling was not only the delicious characterizations by an extraordinary cast, and the exploration of significant social issues - nuclear war, racial tensions, misguided social engineering, etc., all prominent issues of the day (okay, so what's changed?) but the surreal quality of the visual presentation that mirrored the pattern of dreams in a chillingly recognizable way.

In this era of extraordinary graphics capabilities, I eagerly looked forward to new interpretations of the dream sequences so central to the story. Unfortunately, the new interpretation was to eliminate them altogether, along with most of the plot elements, and thereby substituting the original production's cognitive dissonance with somnambulance.

Big words. Lousy movie. Somebody PLEASE try again.

Like many others, I was very interested in this remake of "The Lathe of Heaven," for several reasons. The book by Ursula K. LeGuin is widely regarded as a science-fiction classic, although I have never thought it was among her best work. I read it after I saw the first "Lathe of Heaven" on PBS in 1980 and realized that considerable liberties had been taken with the story, although it was much closer to the book than this latest endeavor.

Back then, "Lathe" was a bold experiment for PBS and the producers: To make an original full-length science-fiction TV movie on a limited budget that would appeal to an audience used to flashier entertainment. Remember, it was only three years since "Star Wars" and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" had revitalized screen science fiction, until then very much in the doldrums. The producers of LOH wanted to make a more intimate story than those blockbuster movies, one based more on human relationships. With their low budget, they looked for places and expedients that would transmit their vision. Although the story was set in Portland, Oregon, they filmed a lot of it in Dallas because of that city's more futuristic architecture. I liked it very much and videotaped it, and have the tape to this day. (Unfortunately but inevitably, the tape had deteriorated significantly when I transferred it to DVD at the end of 2006. Never fear, it appears that it's now available on commercial DVD.)

It says a great deal about inflation in the movie business that the remake had a "small" budget of "only" $5 million. That would have been a lot of money for the original filmmakers. I also wonder why here in the States we had to wait until September of 2002 to see it when the first comments about it, from a viewer in Turkey, are from February!

But whenever it aired, my reaction would be the same: Why did they bother to make it at all? There is so little of the original here that it is essentially a different work. They have taken the story and drained it of its blood. And what does happen goes beyond problems with temporal discontinuities and paradoxes; these people behave without logic or motivation. It looks like a long episode of the "new" Outer Limits or a similar show, one of those low-budget syndicated series that they film in Canada because it's cheaper there, where there is money only for a few sets, a couple of computer graphics, and a lot of talk in closeup (to hide the spareness of the sets). All of the acting and dialogue takes place in murmurs. I usually like James Caan, but it looks like he's been watching Bruce Willis's recent film work and decided to try the minimalist, non-acting approach.

Now that I've brought up The Outer Limits, remember how the opening credits used to talk about "awe and mystery"? Well, if you want awe and mystery, forget about this remake and go back to the 1980 version; it had much more of those qualities.

Having read LeGuinn's book and seen PBS's excellent rendering of her story this new version is a crashing disappointment. The first problem is that there is so little left of the story that much of its impact is missing. In spite of being light on effects and budget the earlier PBS production makes much better use of its resources to communicate LeGuinn's apocalyptic drama to the viewer.

What happened to the space aliens? They seem to be replaced by David Straithorn's character who occasionally pops into scenes with sage verbiage. Unfortunately, so much has been stripped that there is no tissue left to connect him to what little plot remains after the producers and directors finished their hatchet job on content and context. Who knows why they did that?

What's left is a nothingness rivaled only by Jor-Jor's apocalyptic reality. In order to understand what's going on here, one might want to read the book, or view PBS's 1980's telling of the story. Please don't waste your time with this turkey, especially since the PBS version is available on DVD.

This production had a lot of potential. Ursula LeGuin's novel is a long-time classic, but this opportunity to make a new TV adaptation with name actors failed to produce anything but a muddle. Given that there was already a much-loved TV adaptation from 1980 that followed the original novel almost scene-for-scene, the producers' decision to change the basic plot structure of the novel in this version was a good one in principle, but in practice they managed to destroy any hope of showing the characters' relationships develop. The doctor/patient relationship between James Caan and Lukas Haas is so hostile and unprofessional (with Caan shoving Haas into his chair like a James Bond heavy at one point) that I couldn't even believe that Haas would let himself get hypnotized by this guy. The romance between Haas and Lisa Bonet seems to appear full-fledged out of thin air; the plot attempts to provide some feeble justification for this, but the total lack of sparks between the two actors doesn't give us any clue why Bonet has gone from thinking Haas is a psycho to jumping into bed with him.

There's no rule that says a cinematic adaptation can't take liberties with its source material, but unfortunately, in this case, from the plot to the character development to the dialogue, every aspect of this story was handled much better in the original novel. This movie destroys the dramatic tension of LeGuin's novel by trying to compress too much story into too short a time (with tons of ads) and barely even contains enough exposition to enable viewers to suspend their disbelief.

A major disappointment. At one point, the script cleverly refers to "old time TV shows about parallel realities", but in the end, what could have been a refreshing adaptation of a literary classic (with a good cast) came off like a third-rate episode of "Quantum Leap".