The Dead Zone - 1983 - 2 1/2 Stars

Director: David Cronenberg
Cast: Christopher Walken, Brooke Adams, Tom Skerritt, Martin Sheen

I am afraid my citizenship might get revoked for admitting this, but The Dead Zone is the first Cronenberg movie I have seen and even worse, I didn't really care for it. There are moments of excellence in the film, so it's not as if I have given up hope on this plucky underdog Jewish-Canadian filmmaker but I, like most people, don't like being disappointed.

The Dead Zone is an adaptation of a Steven King novel about Johnny Smith (Walken) a man who awakes from a coma with the ability to foresee other's futures when he touches them. As someone who has seen Ed Glosser Trivial Psychic too many times to count and is vaguely familiar with Cronenenberg and Steven King, I was expecting a hammy Walken performance, some good horror setpieces and a Twilight Zone type ironic twist. I got all of that, but there was a lot of brooding in between the elements that I liked, which ruined the films pacing and muddled the film's message.


The double-edged nature of supernatural powers is a common theme in science-fiction and while the quandaries faced by Johnny Smith are addressed throughout the film none are given enough screentime to give the story thematic relevance. Should Johnny Smith be playing God with his supernatural knowledge? Does he have a moral responsibility to use his power even if it causes him immense physical pain? Is sacrificing the ability to have personal relationships worth gaining the power he has?* There is lip service given to all these questions and some others (like a brief detour where Johnny Smith is a local celebrity) but most of the conversations about these questions are clunky and one-sided and all of they cannot all be answered in one 90 minute feature. Cronenberg tries to answer all of them, while having a dense plot and in the process ends up answering none of them.

Muddled themes aside there is still a lot to like about this movie: Walken doesn't just give a great hammy performance, he gives a great performance and shows real humanity and restraint throughout. Martin Sheen gives a dynamic performance as an evil, charismatic, politician and Cronenberg wisely gets wooden performances out of the rest of the cast so Walken and Sheen's energetic performances standout even more than they usually would.

After watching the movie, I read the plot summary of Stephen King's novel on Wikipedia and the film, like most adaptations diverges from source material. As I read the summary I kept thinking to myself "this could be a great movie". It's too bad that Cronenberg didn't deliver a film with a more focused thematically or narratively to take advantage of some great performances and source material.

*Most glaringly his lack of personal relationships isn't solely a function of his power, it's also a function of his coma and while there is a movie to be made about people in coma's acclimatizing to society, The Dead Zone is not that movie.