Spotlight

Spotlight Date: 29-January-06
Spoiler Rating: Medium

Dreamscape (1984)

Looking back on the '80s, I begin to see a subspecies of movie that grows more endearing as time goes by: the sci-fi fantasy of the budding technological age. In films like "Tron" and "War Games," a snarky, underachieving, yet irresistible hero relies on his wits and friends to escape a world of unexplored danger that doesn't involve aliens or time-travel but the mind-boggling reality of computers. These stories still entertain today because their sense of fun has ripened with the onset of cheesiness, and because they reflect an enduring anxiety about breaking new barriers of science and the mind. (In 2006, though, their optimism about joystick junkies saving the world and getting the girl seems overly fantastic.) "Dreamscape" is a variation on this genre, but it satisfies like the rest with the familiar triumph-over-dread scenario and a zesty combination of Dennis Quaid and adorably bad special effects.

The delectable Mr. Quaid stars as Alex Gardner, a gifted but pleasure-loving psychic who left academia behind to employ his talent at the racetrack. He reluctantly acquires a new lease on life when his former professor (Max von Sydow) enlists him to join a project that puts individuals with telepathic powers into other people's dreams. The professor's goal is to cure patients of psychological problems by facilitating positive confrontations in the realm of the REM state. This, however, is not the goal of the project's government overseer (Christopher Plummer), whose nefarious intentions take shape after the President of the United States (Eddie Albert) applies to him for help with nightmares. It's then up to Alex and his love interest (Kate Capshaw) to battle the G-man and his psychic psycho henchman (David Patrick Kelly) in the arena of the president's mind. Within the dreamscape anything goes, from train sex to nuclear armageddon to the hideous Snake Man himself.

If a Snake Man isn't the most phallic thing Alex could encounter in the subconscious, I don't know what is. (Also the cause of the bad special effects.) An openness to pop psychology like this is a good part of the movie's appeal. "Dreamscape" taps into something that everyone finds personally fascinating but just as baffling as computers: those dark, subliminal byways through which we travel at night. Admittedly, nothing here is all that inventive, and the concept that death in a dream spells death in life is too flippant to carry the plot. (I once became tripartite and watched me blow my head off in a dream, and lived to tell the tale.*) But in the essentially feel-good confines of this type of movie, the threat can stand to be vague or silly. It's enough that we recognize it as something really out there, an unavoidable obstacle on the march toward future knowledge, and then succumb to the anodyne of Reagan-era confidence. We may be staring into the void, flicks like "Dreamscape" say, but help is as near as your dormitory scoundrel or neighborhood geek.

Victorious eggheads and Dennis Quaid. I can sleep better now.

*Chew on that one, psychoanalysts!

Copyright © 2006 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.