Movie Review: Brainstorm, Starring Christopher Walken, Natalie Wood, Louise Fletcher, and Cliff Robertson, directed by Douglas Trumbull (1983)

Natalie Wood in Brainstorm, 1983.

Christopher Walken and Natalie Wood in Brainstorm, 1983.

Christopher Walken as scientist Michael Brace in Brainstorm. Someone really needs to make this picture a meme.

Christopher Walken, Louise Fletcher, Joe Dorsey, Natalie Wood, and Cliff Robertson in a scene from Brainstorm. That's three Oscar winners and one legend in the same photo. And Joe Dorsey.

Advertisement for what would have been Natalie Wood's stage debut in Anastasia.

Natalie Wood’s final movie was the science fiction tale Brainstorm. The film holds up well today, and presents an interesting storyline. A scientific team led by Lillian Reynolds (Louise Fletcher) and Michael Brace (Christopher Walken) are developing a headset-like device that allows people to experience thoughts and emotions that have happened to other people. If person A wears the device and records their experiences, then person B can wear the device and play back the tape of what person A did, feeling and experiencing it just as person A did at the time. 

Wood plays Karen Brace, Michael’s wife, and it’s clear that the Braces’ marriage isn’t in very good shape. Karen is a designer, and she gets hired to help with the design of the device. By sharing their memories, the device actually helps bring Michael and Karen closer together again. Meanwhile, Lillian is concerned that the president of their company, Alex Terson (Cliff Robertson) might be planning to sell the technology to the government or the military. 

The device that Michael and Lillian are working on is similar to a virtual reality headset, and the idea that you can experience another person’s thoughts and emotions is a rich one to explore. Because of this, Brainstorm still feels fresh and relevant today. 

The performances in Brainstorm are all very good. It’s a rare film that features three Oscar winners and one bona fide screen legend. Fletcher brings grit and determination to her role as a committed scientist. Robertson is good in a supporting role, exuding both charm and a slight menace. Walken is excellent as Michael. Walken is believable as a quirky genius, as he has the right off-kilter mannerisms to successfully play a scientist who is fully committed to his work and has thus neglected the fact that his marriage is under strain. Wood does the best she can with the material she has to work with. Director Douglas Trumbull said that the role was expanded once Wood was cast in it. She’s good, realistic and believable. She wasn’t going to win an Oscar for her role, but she does a fine job, giving the viewer a portrait of a woman who has obviously had to sacrifice for the sake of her husband’s career. 

Director Douglas Trumbull started out working on visual effects in films. Trumbull worked on 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and Blade Runner. No big deal, just four of the biggest science fiction movies of that era. Trumbull’s original idea was to shoot most of Brainstorm in normal 35MM, but to use a new process for the scenes where characters were experiencing someone else’s thoughts and emotions. Trumbull called the process Showscan, which was filmed in 70MM and was shot at 60 frames per second, rather than the traditional 24 frames. The idea was to present these scenes as more vivid than actual reality. Unfortunately, to have made the movie this way would have necessitated equipping theaters with different projectors to show the movie. Since that was cost prohibitive, Trumbull settled for using 35MM and mono sound for the real scenes, and 70MM with stereo sound for the enhanced reality scenes. It would be interesting to see Brainstorm on a movie screen to see how this would change the effect the movie has. 

Location shooting for Brainstorm began in North Carolina in September, 1981. Just before location shooting started, members of the cast and crew spent a weekend at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, getting in touch with their emotions and doing other New Age-y stuff. Wood and Walken connected right away, and some people on the set thought they might be having an affair. 

After location shooting wrapped, studio filming took place in Hollywood, and the production took a break for the Thanksgiving weekend. Wood and her husband Robert Wagner invited Walken to spend the weekend aboard their yacht, the Splendour. Sometime during the night of November 28-29, 1981, Natalie Wood drowned off of Santa Catalina Island. The events of that evening have been the subject of much debate and speculation, to say the least. 

Soon after Wood’s death, MGM shut down production of Brainstorm. MGM was willing to scrap the movie in order to collect money from the insurance company, rather than trying to finish filming. Trumbull was incensed, as Wood’s part was nearly complete, and he tried to tell MGM that he could successfully complete the movie. The insurance company Lloyd’s of London ending up getting involved, and they agreed with Trumbull that the movie could be finished. Lloyd’s ended up putting up several million dollars for filming and post-production to be completed. 

By the time Brainstorm was finally released, it was late September of 1983; two years after filming had begun. None of the posters I’ve seen for the movie featured Wood’s photo, and while you could argue that the studio was being respectful by not wanting to seem to be profiting from her tragic death, you could also argue that not making the impressive cast more visible wasn’t going to help the box office. Also not helping the box office was the fact that Walken didn’t do anything to promote the movie, since he didn’t want to have to answer questions about what happened on board the yacht that weekend. 

Brainstorm was not a financial success, grossing $10 million dollars against a budget somewhere between $15-$18 million. To play the what if game, if Wood hadn’t died and the movie could have been released according to its original timetable during the summer of 1982, perhaps it would have benefited from a publicity push from Wood and Walken and become a hit. Brainstorm is the kind of odd, quirky movie that seems like it might have found a cult audience on VHS, but it doesn’t seem to have found any audience at all. 

Brainstorm is a movie well worth seeing, especially if you’re a fan of any of the four stars of it. It definitely fits into the paranoid thriller genre that was so popular in the 1970’s. (Spoiler alert: don’t trust any of the white guys in suits who work for the government!) There are some great Christopher Walken moments in the film, and my favorite might be a brief flashback as we see Walken from Wood’s perspective after he’s placed a large satellite dish in their back yard. Walken is wearing a chef’s hat and apron and says, “You could put flowers all around it. I don’t know what you’re so upset about.” 

Of course seeing Brainstorm makes me wonder about Natalie Wood’s career and what she would have done if she were still alive. She was only 43 years old in 1981, and although she had a lengthy career because she started in the movies so young, obviously there was much for her to still accomplish. According to Suzanne Finstad’s biography, Wood was pursuing the screen rights to Nancy Milford’s biography of Zelda Fitzgerald, which would have been an excellent role for Wood. There was also something more immediate on the horizon. In February of 1982, Wood was going to star in a Los Angeles production of the play Anastasia. It would have been Wood’s stage debut, and it might have been the start of a new era in her career. Wood was excited about playing the role, in part because it was a way of connecting with her Russian heritage. 

We’ll never know what the course of Natalie Wood’s life and career would have been had she lived longer, and while we should appreciate all the art that she gave us over the years, it’s hard not to feel the pain of what might have been.