Stephen King’s alien addiction novel needed this adaptation like it needed a metal plate in its head.

The Tommyknockers should have been a feverish small-town descent into invention, dependency and addiction, a story that buzzes with the queasy energy of an idea too big for the human brain to handle. It marked an uncommon foray into pure science fiction for King and, unfortunately, an all-too-common foray into cheap, substandard adaptation for 1990s TV.

In a metatextual context, The Tommyknockers is one of Stephen King’s most personal novels, quasi-autobiographical and proto-confessional. It’s no coincidence that after it was published, the author’s family staged an intervention, and he checked into rehab to finally clean up his act. He thinks it’s an awful book written at his lowest ebb. That’s certainly where The Tommyknockers TV miniseries aims for, with all the dramatic voltage of a dying torch. The book’s manic metaphor for creative obsession and chemical dependency – King’s own struggle with addiction transmuted into sci-fi horror – is reduced to a municipal craft fair of cheap effects, cheaper sub-Rube Goldberg props, and lethargic camerawork. The town of Haven, Maine should feel like it’s being rewired from within, its people slowly co-opted by and into an alien consciousness, but the alien influence on screen manifests with all the menace of a PTA meeting struggling to achieve quorum.

It’s easy to just shrug and chalk it up to network television of the early nineties not being capable of supporting King’s macabre mania, but this was the era of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Babylon 5 and The X-Files; the capability was there – what was lacking was the budget and creative will. The book’s sense of metastasising invention, a town being seduced into their own sacrifice with trinkets, is penny-pinched into a handful of IT helpdesk spare parts filmed under lighting bright enough to banish any mystery. There’s no texture to the town, no sense of rot in the residents – everything is laundered and pressed flat for primetime presentation.

John Power’s direction feels allergic to escalation, and scenes that should pulse with paranoia are played as though the cast were waiting for their next line cue. Cinematographer Paul Lohmann, veteran of Nashville and Heaven Can Wait, seems to be under some malign influence himself, bathing Haven in a sterile wash that flattens even Marg Helgenberger’s best moments. There’s a sense throughout that everyone knows they’re trying to make Close Encounters of the Third Kind with the budget of Murder, She Wrote.

Jimmy Smits at least understands the assignment, even if he’s powerless to complete it. His warmth and volatility cut through the static, and he sells the tragedy of a man watching the woman he loves fade into an eldritch half-life as hard as he can. Helgenberger, too, commits fully, wringing sympathy from Bobbi’s slide into extra-terrestrial intoxication. But they’re adrift in a production that refuses to embrace its own strangeness. Joanna Cassidy gamely invests her supporting role with a kind of frontier scepticism, and E G Marshall looks ready to defect to a better show. No one here is flat-out bad – they’re just trapped in amber, preserved in the limitations of a production that neither understands nor appreciates the scale and savagery of King’s prose.

Of all the ill-fated 1990s King adaptations – I’m pretty sure the decade that cemented the idea that King’s books were great and the adaptations were garbage – The Tommyknockers might be the one that fell furthest short of its potential*. It’s also the one that arguably has more to say to us today than it did at the time it was written and then ruined for television. King’s vision of ordinary people seduced by the promise of innovation – their brilliance corroded by the unseen influence of something exploitative and inhuman – no longer only serves as an allegory for addiction and substance abuse. It maps neatly onto late-stage techno-capitalism. Just picture a reimagined The Tommyknockers as a satire of tech Bro start-up culture: a world of self-proclaimed innovators churning out ever more pointless apps and devices while the true power, the alien mind, remains elsewhere – in boardrooms, in data servers, in the opaque circuitry of the Silicon Valley oligarchy. The people of Haven became puppets of extraterrestrial colonisers; our modern equivalents are the general public, being drained of their souls by entrepreneurs high on venture capital and algorithmic validation.

King’s novel may have been born of a personal reckoning, but it thrummed with addictive momentum, a fever dream of brilliance and self-destruction. This ABC network adaptation, by contrast, nods off mid-binge, occasionally twitching awake to show off another lacklustre special effect before succumbing once more to torpor. The second of ABC’s 1990s run of King miniseries, it dissipates any goodwill garnered by 1990’s It yet, most chillingly, doesn’t mark the network’s nadir when it comes to the author’s work. It owes its length to its turgid pacing and its miniscule amount of entertainment value to the few ideas and sequences of King’s novel that make it through the process unscathed. The book holds a mirror to the creative mind’s predilection for self-destruction; the adaptation waves a flashlight at the mirror and calls it a day. If the aliens of The Tommyknockers truly fed on mental energy, they must have gone hungry here. No wonder the poster is simply the image of an alien tearing its way out of the pages of the book to register its disgust at the TV version.

the tommyknockers review

* As Yoda would say, “No, there is another.”

hail to the king
the tommyknockers review
Score 3/10


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