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Review: ‘Doctor Sleep’ Gives King the Last Word on Kubrick
by John Hayward

(Note: the following review contains no spoilers, but some of the links do, so follow them at your own risk if you have not seen Doctor Sleep.)

Doctor Sleep coincidentally arrived in theaters at the same time HBO is airing a similar continuation of a decades-old story, Watchmen. Neither of these stories is really a “sequel” as the term is commonly understood, but more like an extension and revision of the original, penned more than three decades later. Unlike the Watchmen series, Doctor Sleep is based on a book written by the same author, and it serves as Stephen King’s last word on Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece 1980 adaptation of The Shining, which King loathes.

As with Watchmen, the makers of Doctor Sleep had to decide whether the original book or its filmed adaptation were canonical, because there were considerable differences in both cases. Watchmen signals early on that the original graphic novel is canon and the 2009 movie adaptation is irrelevant, in details ranging from the appearance of the classic characters to the cataclysmic events that concluded the tale.

Doctor Sleep, on the other hand, treats Kubrick’s movie as canon: in the first few minutes we are reminded that lovable old Dick Halloran died when Jack Torrance buried an axe in his stomach and the hideous Overlook Hotel is still standing, although long abandoned. In the book, Halloran lived and the hotel died.

This preference for the movie over the book might seem irksome to King, who has long maintained Kubrick missed the point of the book, or more precisely inverted its emotional and philosophical core to tell a different, bleaker, colder story. The Doctor Sleep novel, naturally, follows the plot of the book and not the movie.

Continues:

https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2019/11/09/review-doctor-sleep-gives-king-the-last-word-on-kubrick/

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