Lathe of Heaven

I thought this was a well made re-make of the 1980 PBS special, which starred Bruce Davison, not Craig Wasson as another reviewer mistakenly noted. (You might remember Bruce Davison as Senator Kelly form X-Men) the real fun I noticed was the Six degrees of separation aspect that Kevin Conway who played Dr. Haber in the 1980 version starred in a movie in 1991 called Rambling Rose with Lukas Haas who would end up playing Orr in this re-make. But I digress, The most exciting thing about this film was it's ability to prove that Lisa Bonet actually CAN act. Seriously, this is a cerebral Sci-Fi movie and a very watchable one at that. I thought Haas was a mismatch for the part but he was able to pull it off.

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".

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.

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.

Let me add my voice to the chorus of naysayers. The A&E remake of "Lathe of Heaven" is a very poor effort. The original PBS production in which novelist Ursula Le Guin participated created awe and scope with a tiny budget. It used clever filmmaking techniques to tell a complex story efficiently. The A&E remake is slow, unremarkable and tediously confined to just a few well appointed sets. Much of the story is reduced to dull exposition. Worst of all, James Caan fails to produce the menace needed to create any suspense. Let's hope the remake of "Solaris" due in late 2002 fares better.