It's hard to see any effort in the film. There's no comedy to speak of, no real drama and, worst of all.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

This fairly low-budgeted PBS film from 1980 shows why a real story, with real ideas, runs rings around the multi-million dollar CGI-fests that overrun theaters today. A sensitive, thoughtful adaptation of the Ursula LeGuin classic about dreams, power, responsibility, Taoism, reality, unreality, and being in & at one with the world, it's blessed with three strong & subtle performances. Bruce Davison, still one of our most underrated actors, is especially fine in conveying the uncertainties & initial confusion of George Orr, as well as his basic human decency & his emerging moral strength as the world continues to shift around him. Yes, the special effects are simple even for 1980 ... but that doesn't matter in the least. The film knows that real science-fiction isn't about special effects; it's about people & ideas. A thoroughly entertaining, gripping story, it brings those ideas to life without lecturing, but by letting the characters live them out & react as real human beings. It's a film I've watched many times over the decades since it first aired, and it remains as fresh & vivid as ever, always revealing something new. How many films can do that? This one does, effortlessly. It needs to be available on DVD again!

As a one time science fiction nut, I always found Ursula K. LeGuin to be one of the most challenging writers in her genre. For me, she hung over the mainstream. This is a nice film that doesn't touch the book, but it has fine performances and a reasonable plot within the constraints that are time travel. A psychiatrist takes advantage of a man whose dreams come to realization, trying to manipulate him for his own purposes. He never grasps the idea that dreams are often surreal and uncontrollable. After Forbidden Planet, I know that allowing the baser things to come to the fore can be disastrous. The problem with the whole topic always gets back to the immutability of time. Traveling forward doesn't seem to have issues; back creates, of course, the butterfly effect and makes for unpredictability. This goes to the mat and is reasonably satisfying, though it is full of holes that could easily render it incomprehensible.

For those who saw it on PBS (aired 12 times, I think), there was nothing like the scene when George runs up on the roof to see the clouds clearing with the original "with a little help from my friends" playing in the background. I think this was one of a few battles the film incurred since the remastered copy has a horrible cover of the song.I bought the DVD and I'm going to edit in the original. Gave me chills.The book was not easy to find. Most of the movie was pulled from the book but the story is a bit different.Do NOT waste your time on the remake, it is terrible. You would think that with the technology available now that a better job could have been done. Too bad.

I remember when this one aired on PBS and the euphoria we the faithful felt at the time. We thought that science fiction had finally really arrived. No more rip-offs of rip-offs of old movie serials: we were finally going to see "real" science fiction on television again (for the first time since the '60's); not the compromise of commercial television but the kind of SF that could only come from Public Television. And what a wonder it was. To see a book like THE LATHE OF HEAVEN, by none other than Ursula K. LeGuin, as fully realized as was humanly possible at that time... yes, it was a wonder to behold. Nor was it going to end there. We were told that wonder would follow on wonder, that an entire series of these thought-provoking programs were in the works. The road ahead looked smooth, the future bright.Sigh. 20/20 hindsight, and all that; but it was a great idea then and it's still a great idea. If not PBS, then some other producing entity. The material is still out there(if you'll pardon the play on words), and the market is arguably stronger than ever. All the genre needs right now is somebody willing to mine all that gold.