Timothy Olyphant is unsurprisingly turning heads with his performance in the new sci-fi series Alien: Earth, but this should come as no surprise since he already proved his worth in sci-fi many years ago. Surprisingly, one of Olyphant’s impressive sci-fi performances came in a Stephen King movie, one of the rare non-horror releases based on the author’s work.

This movie was Dreamcatcher, and Olyphant starred alongside Thomas Jane, Damian Lewis, Jason Lee, and Donnie Wahlberg as a group of friends who go hunting only to end up in the middle of an alien invasion. The film was a mᴀssive box office flop and a critical failure, earning a 28% rating on Rotten Tomatoes but Olyphant impressed.

Timothy Olyphant Was The Best Part Of Stephen King’s Dreamcatcher

Dreamcatcher was a movie that lived and died by the relationships between its friends during the alien invasion. This was extremely important because the aliens were critically denounced based on their appearance, and the military stance was a little too heavy-handed.

Timothy Olyphant was fantastic in his performance as Pete Moore. The film sees the friends start to fall, with Jason Lee’s Beaver the first to die, followed by Damian Lewis’s Jonesy, who ends up possessed by one of the aliens. Sadly, Pete was the next to die, but before his death, he was easily the best character in the film.

Even with Morgan Freeman as the unhinged military commander who prefers to kill anyone involved, it is Olyphant who stands out and helps elevate what was an otherwise forgettable Stephen King adaptation. He also really helps sell the other sci-fi aspect of the movie, as the friends all have psychic abilities.

Pete is the one who uses this skill the best, which also makes him the moral compᴀss of the group, and honestly, he’s the only one who seems like a three-dimensional character. He steals every scene he is in, and when the possessed Jonesy kills him, the film takes a loss it never recovers from.

Dreamcatcher Was Doomed To Fail Before It Was Made

Dreamcatcher never had a chance when it hit theaters. Most Stephen King fans already considered it one of the author’s worst novels, yet Hollywood wanted to throw anything with King’s name on it at the screen in an era where he had more misses than hits on the big and small screen.

Stephen King even disliked Dreamcatcher — the book and the movie. Unlike The Shining, where King hates the movie because it changed the best parts of his book, he hates Dreamcatcher as a story. King puts Dreamcatcher and his other major sci-fi work, Tommyknockers, on a list of books he wrote that he doesn’t like.

King said that it was the first book he wrote after the 1999 accident, in which a man driving a van hit him and almost killed the author. King said he was taking a lot of OxyContin for the pain, and since he couldn’t sit at a computer, he wrote the book longhand. King said that the drugs and pain affected his writing.

When the movie hit theaters, Stephen King fans were aware of the problems with the overlong and uneven novel and never gave the film a chance. It was better they didn’t, because what resulted on the big screen remains one of King’s most disappointing adaptations.

Timothy Olyphant’s More Recent Sci-Fi Output Makes Up For Dreamcatcher’s Failure

While Dreamcatcher was a failure both commercially and critically, Timothy Olyphant came out of the movie as one of the only actors looking good. He went on to be great in the video game adaptation Hitman and was a highlight in the underrated I Am Number Four, based on the novel series by Pittacus Lore.

Now, Olyphant is turning heads in the new spinoff streaming series Alien: Earth. Olyphant plays Kirsh, a synthetic chief scientist who has a striking resemblance to David from the Alien prequels. With his bright white hair and aged look, he still has the familiarity for viewers and delivers a fantastic sci-fi performance in the movie.

This should come as no surprise. Timothy Olyphant has proven to be a master of many genres, including his brilliant turns on Santa Clarita Diet and Justified, and his role in Dreamcatcher proves that he can even deliver great performances even with lackluster material to work with.