rewatch last night

Saw this last night on Horror Channel for 1st time in what must be literally decades ..have vague recollection of seeing it as a kid on TV in the 80s particular scenes like the fire, the ice break (da ice..is gonna break!), the WW2 scene, and the really eerie WW3 scene (the missiles are flying..hallelujah) and the botched assassination and aftermath.. then I had the VHS at some point in the 90s but maybe only watched it once idk

Anyway watching it again (in nice near HD widescreen unlike poor quality pan scan VHS) I starting thinking about how big the actors were at the time and figured Walken was a big name after he won the Oscar for Deer Hunter in 78 and Sheen was in Apocalypse Now in 79 and I was like oh wow the 2 big Vietnam movie actors (no Platoon yet) facing off against each other .. (I wonder if that was in anyway intentional.. like Cronenbergs commentary on post Vietnam/Watergate America or something) and the strange foreshadowing aspect with how Sheen went on to have the political roles in The American President and West Wing (and of course theres now the foreshadowing to DJT) and how Walken referenced Sleepy Hollow throughout and then ended up in the movie about 15y later (I guess maybe Burton cast him in Sleepy Hollow as a sort of injoke to TDZ after working with him on Batman Returns). And also even the supporting cast were big genre names that id completely forgotten (or hadn't realised as wasn't that versed in SF cinema when I last saw it) like Tom Skerritt , Anthony Zerbe, Herbert Lom and the Body Snatchers woman (which I hadn't seen last time I watched TDZ)

And of course it being a Cronenberg movie it had that Cronenberg feel: Canada, a feeling of cold foreboding in every scene, slightly off kilter characters, hard R body horror without warning (which must've been even more shocking at the time), but there was like a stark simplicity to it all as well (and halfway though I remembered it was a Stephen King novel so theres that SK aspect/feel to it as well and all the SK movie legacy there is now).. and how it must've been Cronenbergs follow up to Scanners in 81 so it had some of that Scanners feel and how the actors must've been aware of that movie and its acclaim/success and signed up to be in this Canadian Cronenbergs latest flick

any way. just.. random thoughts.. going through. my head. as i watched it. again (said Walken style)