A Scanner Darkly - C+

Quick Hit: A movie that is easy to have mixed feelings about.

​Richard Linklater is a director with a solid vision of what he wants a movie to be. From Dazed and Confused to Boyhood, there is an enormity of dialogue in his films that tend to hold court with some of the best dialogue driven pictures out there. His films can be divisive, boring, exciting, funny, dramatic, sad – just the entire gamut of emotions.

A Scanner Darkly is no different at all. Based off a Phillip K. Dick novel of the same name (released in 1977 at the height of Dick’s paranoia), the movie is a true adaptation of the novel. It feels full of paranoia and government surveillance gone wild (at a time before we knew about the NSA surveillance). It stars Keanu Reeves as a disillusioned undercover agent that is deep undercover as a full-time drug user. His addict friends include Woody Harrelson, Winona Ryder, and Robert Downey Jr.

​The movie itself isn’t exceptionally great (though there are parts that are terrific). Sometimes, the most faithful adaptations of novels have trouble gaining traction on the screen because books and film are different mediums, so it’s hard to portray things in the same manner. One thing that truly translates from the book is the mood of paranoia that persists. Dick was someone who had a mental illness and a deep distrust of the 

Just a typical afternoon with friends.

government. His writing is penetrated throughout with these themes (some other more successful adaptations of his work are Blade Runner and Minority Report). The film sells that, and sells it hard. Despite the lack of a great story, the mood and acting make it watchable. 
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The acting throughout is pretty good. Actually, scratch that. RDJ makes this film. In a time when most of us are used to seeing him as Tony Stark, it’s good to see an actor draw on his true life experiences as a past drug addict to portray the manic episodes that portray an intelligent addict. Without him, most of the film would be rather dull, despite the fact that Reeves plays a pretty good version of a beaten down man (isn’t that what he plays best?).

I wish I could blow smoke rings.

The standout in this film though is obviously the animation style (which I have held off until this point – anybody confused on the pictures?). Richard Linklater pioneered this with an animator, and it is called “interpolated rotoscoping” – in this case, with a digital assist. Basically, they take animators and trace over the original footage frame by frame. The technique lends a feeling of surreal to the movie. It’s hard to tell what is real, what is hallucination. Indeed, from the very first scene where Freck is trying to rid himself of the bugs, it’s clear that you aren’t watching a movie like ones you have seen before. The real winner for effects goes to the scramble suit. It perfectly captures Dick’s description, and must have been an animation nightmare. . Not only is this an impressive feat in its own right, but they somehow manage to keep Keanu recognizably Keanu throughout the scrambling. Kudos to the animation team here.

Wow.

Sheesh.

I don’t think this movie is for everyone, and even if you like it, you were probably in a time in your life where you wanted something like this. Watch it ten years later, and you might not anymore. So, since the movie was average overall, I give it a C+.

Check out more on this movie at IMDB.