What Dreams May Come

Here's a movie that came out just a little too soon (1998) for me to have seen or understood in its own time. Going in, I knew two things about What Dreams May Come: that it was widely considered to be a visually stunning and imaginative masterpiece, and also that it's become the butt of many jokes about the career of Robin Williams. So the door was wide open here, and I didn't know what to expect. What I got was a partially satisfying, very memorable, but ultimately irrelevant experience. There's a certain innate arrogance that people will be faulted for having anytime they share their own personal idea of what heaven or the afterlife would be like, but I don't like that; I won't call this film pretentious. But I also can't call it a great movie, or even a good one on a technical level. It certainly was imaginative and stunning, but so was Inception, and we all know how riddled with plot holes and pseudo-drama that movie was. Actually, this movie reminded me a great deal of The Fountain, and that's kind of weird, because The Fountain has nothing to do with heaven or an afterlife. I think I liked The Fountain more, even if (or perhaps because?) it was way more vague. This movie was just a little too unoriginal for me. I swear I'm not spoiling the plot any more than the small summary on the back of the DVD case when I say that Robin Williams dies and goes to heaven and then his wife commits suicide and goes to hell and then he goes all the way into the depths of hell to rescue her. It just all felt kind of trite. The takeaway seemed to be a very bland combination of tried and true themes such as "love conquers all" or "the human experience is not bound by mortality." But at least the whole thing was better than the "sideways" universe in the final season of Lost. Ugh. Compared to that wishy-washy cop-out bullshit, this movie was like The Godfather. And at least here the afterlife sequences actually meant something. Remove them from this movie and all you're left with is a horribly depressing half hour in which a man and a woman lose their two children in a car accident, and then the man dies in a car accident, and then the woman kills herself, and then the credits roll. Somebody should cut that and put it up on YouTube or something, because that actually sounds morbidly hilarious. But yeah. Take the afterlife sequences out of Lost, and you're left with... well, you're left with what is probably a much better season. Anyway, in the end I'm glad to have seen this film but I don't think it's as special or meaningful as it wanted to be, and I won't be going out of my way to recommend it to anyone. And seriously, fuck Lost.