It’s been quite a while since I cracked a Stephen King book; at some point, I guess I came to the conclusion that he had already said all that he had to say. This particular movie — which I heard someone say follows the book on which it’s based very closely — doesn’t nullify that conclusion, but does suggest that perhaps a little reinforcement of the same thing doesn’t always hurt. I may just run out, buy the book, and read it.

This is science-fiction horror as only King can (and does) write it; it includes elements of a number of earlier works, put together, mixed around, and presented in a slightly new way.

Here we have four boys, friends (shades of Stand By Me!), who, in a flashback, find themselves rescuing young Douglass “Dudits” Cavell, a student at the neighboring “Retard Academy” (a school of the emotionally or, in Dudits’s case, mentally disabled) from a group of somewhat older bullies who, having caught him alone, are trying to force him to eat something unmentionable. Dudits falls in with the four, who show remarkable empathy for a group of young boys, and at one point, in helping them to rescue one of his fellow students, somehow enables them to demonstrate remarkable powers — the ability to read each others’ minds and, in the case of Pete Moore (Timothy Olyphant), find things that are lost, a talent that ultimately will prove more of a hindrance than a help in Pete’s love life as an older man.

Jump years into the future, to a day in one of King’s favorite story sites, the middle-sized town of Derry, Maine. The four boys, grown into men, are going about their daily tasks. Psychiatrist Henry Devlin (Thomas Jane) is using his mind-reading abilities to try to help a patient — unfortunately, to ill effect. University instructor Gary Jones (Damian Lewis) is using his talent to catch one of his students out at cheating on an exam — and then using an even greater talent to give the student a second chance. Moore is helping a really build blonde real estate saleswoman find her lost car keys, for which she promises to go to dinner with him (but she will never, ever show). And Joe Clarendon, “Beaver” (Jason Lee), is sitting in a bar getting drunk, chewing on toothpicks, and getting ready to warn Jones to “look out” for something nasty about to happen. Jones fails to look out, and indeed something nasty does happen.

Six months later, the four friends, including a recuperating Jones, are on retreat in an old hunting cabin in the Maine woods. Devlin and Moore head off to Gosselin’s general store at the edge of the woods, to fill up on supplies (particularly liquid supplies, mainly for Moore), while Jones and Beaver go hunting. The latter two return with a really, really sick hunter, while the former two, racing back to beat a snowstorm, have a wreck while avoiding the really, really sick hunter’s really, really sick wife. This is where things get strange.

Cut to a super-special, super-secret army group known as Blue (shades of The Stand!), which exists to destroy incursions by a batch of really, really nasty super-aliens. There’s an alien spacecraft down in this part of Maine (shades of The Tommyknockers!), some of the aliens are wandering around loose, and they are spreading a nasty fungal disease known affectionately as “Ripley”. Turns out this is deliberate — they want to seize earth for their own, and to do so they seem to have to do some terraforming — and Blue exists to prevent them from doing so. They’ve quarantined an area in the center of which our four heroes are located — and now it will be up to them to help save the earth from the alien menace, about which they are totally ignorant.

The nice thing about this movie, as others have pointed out, is that you can come to care about the main characters — and then, when they die (as some of them do), it hurts a bit. The nasties (“Mr. Gray” ^[1]) are nasty, and with the possible ⁽²⁾ exception of the Blue leader, Col. Kurtz (the inimitable Morgan Freeman), the good guys are good and likeable. At one spot, there’s a bit of toilet humor, which appears comic at the time, though it turns out not to be really very funny.

An enjoyable film, if one likes this particular genre.

⁽¹⁾ “Mr. Gray” is a reference to the “Gray” aliens, a part of post-Roswell UFO mythology that King, as well as the aliens in the film, use to good effect. For an early mention of “Mr. Gray”, pay particular attention to the scene in which the boys and Dudits are looking for the lost girl, mentioned above.

⁽²⁾ Kurtz has his reasons for being an S.O.B., and it’s even possible to sympathize with him about them.