Welcome to the movie version of The Dead Zone, one of the last movies I watched in 2017 and my first blog post of 2018! As time permits I will include the remaining movies tied to Night Shift, and I'm sure when the next story collection hits there will be plenty more to review.
I know I've steeled myself in the past for bad movies based on at-least-not-awful books and short stories, but The Dead Zone left me disappointed. First off, although the novel was Stephen King's shortest work since 'Salem's Lot (and about a third the size of The Stand!), it carries a more epic feel to it, spanning a whole decade. Aside from some stray preludes or codas, the previous novels, even The Stand, were far tighter on timelines. Nevertheless filmmaker David Cronenberg squashes it into just over 100 minutes, which actually is a little longer than average for King adaptations. Of course many of those were based on shorter works, either by page count or timeline. As we'll see, this fundamentally alters the flow of the movie.
As I had noted after reading the novel, The Dead Zone is an end-of-decade novel, a chronicle of the 1970's. The movie, on the other hand, is virtually divorced from any historical backdrop. The beginning part, before Johnny's accident, is very rushed and features a truly strange date at a seemingly abandoned amusement park, or at least it featured a roller coaster nobody wanted to ride except for them. There is no Wheel of Fortune, something key enough to the book that it only warranted naming the entire first half after it. The coma also passes in a snap. Maybe Cronenberg wanted viewers to feel like Johnny had have no record of what happened for five years. And for five years, nothing much looks different except for Johnny and Sarah's hairstyles, being wilder and shorter, respectively. Also, everything before and after still looks like 1983.
As with the book, Johnny's psychic journey takes him into an extremely brief but ultimately unsatisfying career in law enforcement (psychic services division), before he retreats into a life of private tutoring. This is about the time we finally meet Greg Stillson, who is background-free in this movie and comes off as somewhat unhinged and Trump-like, but not the sociopathic nutjob from the novel. I mean, this is Martin "President Bartlett" Sheen, after all. Just to add a really poignant twist on things, Sarah is now an active supporter of his campaign. I don't think it was long after this that I saw the writing on the wall. The kid that Stillson uses as a human shield will of course be her child and she will witness Johnny's final showdown. Finally, it feels like some subtlety from the novel was lost when Johnny gets one final read on Stillson and sees the "suicide scene" in his future, thereby knowing that the Stillson-initiation nuclear war threat had been averted. In the book he just gets no read at all and that's enough for readers to know the future is safe. Even in the movie earlier, with the weird fatal hockey accident vision, Johnny's confirmation of a no-read is used, so I guess the filmmakers just wanted everyone to be really sure Stillson was finished.
Unfortunately, I fear that Christopher Walken may have undermined his career through extensive self-parody. Check out this classic Saturday Night Live skit which is nothing short of a full-on hilarious mockery of this movie: Ed Glosser, Trivial Psychic. The unfortunate side effect is that it also causes a serious work like this one to come off a little silly. I'll be the first to admit this is not the fault of Cronenberg or Walken (at least not for another few years), but my own challenge as a viewer that must come to grips with the notion that the early 1980's are now "historic" in terms of film. Otherwise there was nothing too out of the ordinary about the acting, although Martin Sheen as Greg Stillson, as my wife notes and I concur, comes off as a proto-Charlie Sheen.
This movie and book set the groundwork many years later for a six season cable TV series. Mainly due to my annoyance-bordering-on-open-hatred toward the Under the Dome TV series, I've decided that I really don't need to watch TV shows based on Stephen King's work that go beyond the miniseries level.
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