Watch The Lathe of Heaven For Free

Don't Believe the Hype

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

This original version remains my favorite film of all time. Somehow it's much better than even its color remake. A very close tie is Forbidden Planet. Close behind are the classic BLADE RUNNER and the color version of Lathe of Heaven. The greatest series EVER for TV is, of course, Babylon 5 followed by the original PRISONER.The stark scenes, in the 1980 LATHE, contrast vividly with the dreamer's rich ability to brighten his, OUR, world. While exploring the power of our minds, it also shows the penalty for careless use and abuse of that power. This is a film to keep and show our kids and theirs and theirs......

As a one time science fiction nut, I always found Ursula K. LeGuin to be one of the most challenging writers in her genre. For me, she hung over the mainstream. This is a nice film that doesn't touch the book, but it has fine performances and a reasonable plot within the constraints that are time travel. A psychiatrist takes advantage of a man whose dreams come to realization, trying to manipulate him for his own purposes. He never grasps the idea that dreams are often surreal and uncontrollable. After Forbidden Planet, I know that allowing the baser things to come to the fore can be disastrous. The problem with the whole topic always gets back to the immutability of time. Traveling forward doesn't seem to have issues; back creates, of course, the butterfly effect and makes for unpredictability. This goes to the mat and is reasonably satisfying, though it is full of holes that could easily render it incomprehensible.

Would you want your dreams to come true, even your nightmares? Based on Leguin's novel of the same name. George Orr discovers that his dreams come true except George isn't dreaming the future, his dreams are changing the past to create the future he dreams. Once George wakens, he is the only person to remember the alternative past, that is until he visits a psychiatrist who realizes the potential of George's dreams and sets out to 'right' the world with fantastic consequences.This film is full of ambiguous metaphor and allegory so that everyone seems to see something a little different. I found the movie a bit overlong but then I can't imagine it being a minute shorter. Because the original print was lost the movie looks pretty crappy with ghosting and graininess, but powerful themes don't need pretty pictures and Lathe of Heaven above all else is cautionary about being unsatisfied and forcing drastic change on the others. Ultimately we learn that despite how bad things are, they could be worse, much worse.The film takes some pretty bizarre twists with aliens that just come out of nowhere, well they come from George's subconscious. Pondering this I am reminded how powerful science fiction really was to the 70's and while most people only remember it for Star Wars and assume that everything else was trying to cash in, the 70's were really a treasure trove of interesting sci-fi and when the UFO subculture really reached it's height. Project Blue Book was published in 1976, Brad Steiger, Stan Friedman and others ignited the public's imagination. Close Encounters and Alien preyed on our hopes and fears respectively; and Star Trek was resurrected from the dead. So all in all it really wasn't that bizarre for George to be thinking about aliens because even though the film is set in 1998, it's very much a product of the 70's.The copy I watched had an interview with the author, Leguin, who declined to interpret the book/movie as she wasn't entirely sure of all the meanings both might hold. What was most interesting was her conclusions about George and Dr. Huber, particularly George whom she sees as a strong man but many others see as something of a weakling.

I remember when this one aired on PBS and the euphoria we the faithful felt at the time. We thought that science fiction had finally really arrived. No more rip-offs of rip-offs of old movie serials: we were finally going to see "real" science fiction on television again (for the first time since the '60's); not the compromise of commercial television but the kind of SF that could only come from Public Television. And what a wonder it was. To see a book like THE LATHE OF HEAVEN, by none other than Ursula K. LeGuin, as fully realized as was humanly possible at that time... yes, it was a wonder to behold. Nor was it going to end there. We were told that wonder would follow on wonder, that an entire series of these thought-provoking programs were in the works. The road ahead looked smooth, the future bright.Sigh. 20/20 hindsight, and all that; but it was a great idea then and it's still a great idea. If not PBS, then some other producing entity. The material is still out there(if you'll pardon the play on words), and the market is arguably stronger than ever. All the genre needs right now is somebody willing to mine all that gold.