Plot
In the town of Castle Rock, Maine, Johnny Smith (Christopher Walken), a young New England schoolteacher, is in love with his colleague Sarah Bracknell (Brooke Adams). He is involved in a serious car accident that sends him into a coma. He awakes under the care of neurologist Dr. Sam Weizak (Herbert Lom) and finds that five years have passed and that his girlfriend has since married and had a child. Johnny also discovers that he has the ability to learn a person's secrets (past, present, future) through making physical contact with them. As he touches a nurse's hand, he sees her daughter trapped in a fire and also realizes Dr. Weizak's mother, long thought dead from the war, is still alive. As news of his "gift" spreads, he is asked by the nearby sheriff (Tom Skerrit) for help with a series of killings but declines. Sarah visits him with her infant son and the two wind up making love.
Johnny then agrees to help the sheriff and through a vision realizes it's his own deputy that is committing the murders. Before they can arrest him, the deputy gets away and commits suicide. Johnny is then shot and injured by the man's mother. Disillusioned, Johnny moves away and attempts to live a more isolated life, taking on tutoring jobs and working from home.
After seeing a vision of the boy he is tutoring falling through the ice during a hockey game, Johnny warns the boy's father (Anthony Zerbe) and the boy avoids the tragedy, although two other boys are killed. Johnny then realizes he has a "dead zone" in his visions, where he can actually change the future.
Later, Johnny discovers through a handshake that a US Senatorial Candidate whom Sarah is volunteering for, Greg Stillson (Martin Sheen), will become President of the United States, and through the handshake sees Stillson ordering a nuclear strike against Russia, thus presumably bringing on a nuclear holocaust. Johnny feels it to be his duty to assassinate Stillson. Johnny attempts to shoot Stillson at a church rally, but misses and is shot by Stillson's security detail. Stillson grabs Sarah's baby and holds him up in the air as a human shield; this act is photographed. Johnny is confronted by an angered Stillson; he grabs his hand and foresees Stillson committing suicide due to the destruction of his reputation after his cowardly act is revealed. Johnny then says to Stillson "It's over. You're finished." A satisfied Johnny then dies with Sarah by his side.
Read more about this topic: The Dead Zone (film)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“The westward march has stopped, upon the final plains of the Pacific; and now the plot thickens ... with the change, the pause, the settlement, our people draw into closer groups, stand face to face, to know each other and be known.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“After I discovered the real life of mothers bore little resemblance to the plot outlined in most of the books and articles I’d read, I started relying on the expert advice of other mothers—especially those with sons a few years older than mine. This great body of knowledge is essentially an oral history, because anyone engaged in motherhood on a daily basis has no time to write an advice book about it.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)