The Almost Classic

Revisiting Brainstorm after about 20 years reminds one of why this film is largely forgotten by the public except outside of a loyal cult of Walken, Trumbull, or Natalie Wood fans. The James Horner score is incredible, the special effects visions beautiful, and the overall concept of experiencing virtual realites highly intriguing and ahead of its time. Why is it such a bad movie? I can think of some of my criticisms revisiting the film:
Natalie Wood and her relationship with Walken is completely extraneous to the plot and serves as a distraction, as is also the bloated attention given to the military takeover of the project.The Wood sequences understandably seem wobbly due to the well known attempts to edit the movie around her untimely demise. The military sub-plot could not have been more cliched and uninteresting. The script should have been structured around Walken's experience of Fletcher's death trip. He could have easily completed the Experience roughly an hour into the movie, before the movie devolves in its latter third into an incoherent mishmash, with Wood and Walken hacking improbably into company facilities to play the death tape and wreak general havoc. Industrial robots are programmed to go berzerk with guards falling all over the floor in low slapstick comedy that has not been the tone of this film and is neither funny nor necessary. A sub-plot about their son experiencing a "psychotic break" due to one of the military's simulations is introduced and dropped with scarcely an afterthought. (Even stranger perhaps was a scene in which the boy walks in on his parents naked after a night of passionate lovemaking. Neither the son nor his parents seem to think anything of it.) The movie hints that it wants to deal with how this virtual reality experience changes people's lives. We are shown one example of this in the character of Hal, the older guy who experiences vicariously somebody else's sexual experience and suddenly has a new lease on life with greatly enhanced vigor, like the old folks in Cocoon who experience the rejuvenating qualities of swimming near extraterrestrial pods. The story I was interested in with Brainstorm was not the one that was told: Walken should have been allowed to complete the death trip recording as the climax to the second act, with the rest of the film chronicling the story of a character who has experienced the death of the physical body and traveled beyond the confines of this consciousness reality. This whipped-up military plot did absolutely nothing for the overall project. One admires Brainstorm today only for what it could have been.