| The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review |
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| Science-Fiction |
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BRAINSTORM
Rating: 
USA. 1983.
Director/Producer – Douglas Trumbull, Screenplay – Philip Messina & Robert Stitzel, Story – Bruce Joel Rubin, Photography – Richard Yuricich, Music – James Horner, Visual Effects Supervisors – Douglas Trumbull & Allison Yerxa, Computer Effects – Don Baker, Animation Supervisor – John C. Walsh, Makeup – William Munns, Production Design – John C. Vallone. Production Company – MGM-UA.
Cast:
Christopher Walken (Michael Brace), Natalie Wood (Karen Brace), Louise Fletcher (Lillian Reynolds), Cliff Robertson (Alex Terson), Joe Dorsey (Hal Abramson)
Plot: Scientists Michael Brace and Lillian Reynolds build a device capable of recording and playing back sensory experience. As they experiment with its various possibilities, Lillian dies of a heart-attack but manages to record the experience. However the project is taken over and shut down by their military backers and Brace forbidden to view the tape. With the help of his estranged wife Karen, Brace conducts a telephone hack-in to the computer to access the tape and view the recorded experience of the afterlife.
Douglas Trumbull is an interesting name within the sf genre. Trumbull’s principal field of expertise is visual effects and he has conducted work on top-drawer genre vehicles such as 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), The Andromeda Strain (1971), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Star Trek – The Motion Picture (1979) and Blade Runner (1982). For a time during the late 1970s, Trumbull was considered the top name in special effects. Indeed Close Encounters drew him as much attention within the genre at the time as it did Steven Spielberg. (Although since Brainstorm, Trumbull has dropped into almost total obscurity). Trumbull is multi-disciplined, having also turned director with the interesting sf film Silent Running (1971). Brainstorm was Trumbull’s second and last feature film as director. Trumbull chose this project to showcase his longtime interest in 70mm widescreen film-making. The film is shot in standard 35mm but for the point-of-view scenes of the device in operation, Trumbull lets the screen expand and open up to 70mm. During the film’s original theatrical release, the screen would change between the two formats, an effect that is totally lost on the film’s tv and video screenings these days.
The film has a dazzling central concept – even if most of the script is stolen from D.G. Compton’s novel Synthajoy (1968). This makes it one of the first films to deal with Virtual Reality – well before the term was actually coined. (Although the first VR film was actually Welcome to Blood City [1977]). But for all the fascinating aspects inherent in the idea, it is something that the film fails to fulfill. The most interesting parts of the film are those that show the capabilities of the device – one man trapping himself in a continuous loop of sexual experience or where Christopher Walken’s son accidentally enters the experience of a psychotic. But the rest of the film comes across largely as an extended IMAX test reel. It suffers from the same problems that all IMAX featurettes do – that super-widescreen filmmaking is something that, while excellent for highly intense depiction of the pictographic, tends to so overwhelm sensorily that it is useless for telling all but the simplest stories. There’s lots of nice widescreen scenes hang-gliding and riding on rollercoasters but it still looks like a widescreen travelogues.
Trumbull captures a certain verisimilitude of showing scientists at work but when the film tries to develop a plot it merely resorts to military paranoia cliches and a laboratory destruction sequence that seems clumsily inserted. Trumbull’s editing and set-ups are often sloppy – the sense of wonder of the climactic venture into the afterlife is considerably undone by Trumbull constantly cutting away to the scenes of Natalie Wood hacking into the computer system. Trumbull is a far better effects man than director and certainly his Tron (1982)-styled view of Heaven is stunning (even if the idea of Heaven looking like the inside of a computer circuit is one that goes strangely uncommented on).
The production was crippled following Natalie Wood’s accidental drowning in 1982 towards the end of shooting. Although there is reportedly only one scene that this affected, MGM wanted to dump the film but Trumbull managed to salvage it with the help of an insurance policy from Lloyd’s of London. Wood’s performance is cut around well and the film is a fitting tribute to her career.
Subsequent to Brainstorm, Trumbull has abandoned special effects and feature filmmaking altogether and has vanished almost entirely from cinema screens. His work now concentrates on his long-planned Showscan process – a series of short films designed for projection in specially designed theatres that are made in 70mm and projected at 60 frames per second. His 70mm short films include New Magic (1983), Big Ball (1983), Let’s Go (1985), Leonardo’s Dream (1989) and To Dream of Roses (1990). Alas Showscan never quite caught on and was eventually co-opted by the IMAX process, with Trumbull later becoming a vice-chairman of the IMAX corporation. Trumbull also directed Universal Studios Back to the Future ride in 1991.
The original idea for the film came from Bruce Joel Rubin who has gone onto write/direct a number of other films that all concern themselves with death and the afterlife – Ghost (1990), Jacob’s Ladder (1990) and My Life (1993).
Copyright Richard Scheib 1990
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