I’ve been obsessing over coronavirus statistics lately, so for some light-hearted fun, I watched Dr. Sleep based on Stephen King’s book. Ok, it wasn’t light-hearted. It was scary. The book is a sequel to one of King’s most famous books, The Shining. If you haven’t seen or read The Shining, a lot of the back story won’t make much sense to you. Some of the scarier parts might not be as scary either. Overall, it was a good movie that owes a lot to The Shining. Nevertheless, it might be able to stand on its own.
The Shining
The second scene introduces the main character as a boy 30+ years earlier. The shot is straight from Kubrik’s The Shining. I have to specify Kubrik’s version because King authorized another version that he thought was more true to the book. It was a stinking pile of crap.
The director matched the characters and a few shots from Kubrik’s movie pretty well, but nobody plays Jack Nicholson like Jack. The actor was a close physical approximation, but he lacked Nicholson’s intensity. Even in the understated, quiet scenes in The Shining, Jack Nicholson exudes and intense menace. The stand-in in Dr. Sleep did not. To be fair, the scene was more about Ewan McGregor’s character Dan’s relationship with his father and the bottle than about Jack Torrance.
The director meticulously copied scenes from The Shining, but they lacked the scariness and menace they did when we first saw them 40 years ago. Even the flood of blood from the elevator scene lacked ppunch. The main villain dismissed it with a smirk when she saw it. Familiarity breed contempt, I guess.
Dr. Sleep
What was good about the newer movie was seeing how the events of 40 years ago affected little Danny when he grew up as a man. It was nice to see his old mentor (with Carl Lumbly playing Scatman Crothers’s role) helping him through tough times.
What was driving the villains in this movie was different from The Shining. It felt like a late addition to the story. The ghosts in the earlier movie made no mention of anything like it. In Dr. Sleep, it became their motivation as well as that of the new villains. It worked well as a motivation for Rebecca Ferguson and crew (crow? crawdaddy?), but I felt the new story forced it on the ghosts of the earlier story. I’m not a fan of artistic revisionism.
The movie has its moments. It’s thrilling to watch supernaturally powerful characters face off against each other, especially when it upends your assumptions of who is the more powerful. The movie feels like a whodunnit in that it masks the truth from certain characters even when we, as omniscient viewers, know what is going on. Even so, the movie is not predictable. How our heros get down from the tree the author put them up might surprise you.
