Lathe of Heaven

I agree with the consensus. This film stinks. The true plot is brusquely steamrolled over in order to force the emphasis toward a badly cast romance between George and Heather.

This type of butchery is very common these days. Look at most of the `original series' on the Sci-fi (sic) channel. Get a bunch of young and beautiful people into spaceships, fill it with flashing lights, a crotchety alien with a bony forehead and the personality of your uncle Irving, derivative dialog about `shields failing' and `re-routing emergency power', don't EVER have an original or though provoking story-line and voila you get the distilled pap that passes these days as science fiction.

Its unfortunate that style, special effects and sex-appeal are what now count instead of real dialog and story. The original Lathe of Heaven wasn't perfect, but everything about it, from the slow build-up of George's relation with Dr. Haber, to the philosophical discussions about righting the world's wrongs made for an engaging and genuine exercise in science fiction.

Big budgets, merchandising tie-ins, vapid music and a bland dumbed-down appeal characterize far too many productions these days.

I watched The Lathe of Heaven in 1980 on a small black & white TV. It was my first winter in my first apartment after college. This movie stayed with me and tens of thousands of other viewers for years, 20 of them to be exact. All we wanted was to see it again as we saw it then. A&E has my respect and admiration for the entertainment that they broadcast. This was not even a good effort. This was just bad and it is insulting. Some movies, like Psycho, should not be remade. There was no room for improvement in the original writing, casting, cinematography, score, anything. It is arguably one of the best science-fiction films ever made. It re-defined the genre much in the way that The Wild Bunch, re-defined the western. This remake is almost unwatchable. It is abysmally bad. Lose this and show the original in it's place.

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.

I am at a loss to understand why producers feel the need to remake perfectly good movies into mediocre movies. I just don't get it.

Ursula K. Le Guin's tale of George Orr, a wretched young man with the power to alter reality by literally dreaming up a new one, is a good story with many layers. George falls victim to a well-meaning (at first, anyway) psychotherapist, Dr. Haber, who uses George to remake the universe. George is one of those poor souls who cannot resist the will of anyone he perceives to be an authority and consequently finds himself remaking the universe to Haber's specifications. We all know that the road to a well known place is paved with good intentions, and this supplies the conflict that makes the drama.

If you've never read Ursula K. Le Guin's novel or seen the 1980 PBS film, you might like this effort. Otherwise, don't waste your time. This movie wimped out in several places by watering down the script to avoid any racial overtones, so well handled in both the book and the earlier film. There were other instances where I felt the script writers and the producer were trying to be as PC as possible. The story dragged, and all in all I found it flat.

The casting was OK with one exception -- Lisa Bonet, a generally competent actress, was sadly miscast as Heather LeLache, George's court-appointed lawyer. The role called for an in your face, very black lady with an attitude, not a wimpy cutie.

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.