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How well you respond to Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly depends on how much you know about the life and work of celebrated science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. While it qualifies as a faithful adaptation of Dick's semiautobiographical 1977 novel about the perils of drug abuse, Big Brother-like surveillance and rampant paranoia in a very near future ("seven years from now"), this is still very much a Linklater film, and those two qualities don't always connect effectively.
The creepy potency of Dick's premise remains: The drug war's been lost, citizens are kept under rigid surveillance by holographic scanning recorders, and a schizoid addict named Bob Arctor (Keanu Reeves) is facing an identity crisis he's not even aware of: Due to his voluminous intake of the highly addictive psychotropic drug Substance D, Arctor's brain has been split in two, each hemisphere functioning separately. So he doesn't know that he's also Agent Fred, an undercover agent assigned to infiltrate Arctor's circle of friends (played by Woody Harrelson, Winona Ryder, Rory Cochrane, and Robert Downey, Jr.) to track down the secret source of Substance D. As he wears a "scramble suit" that constantly shifts identities and renders Agent Fred/Arctor into "the ultimate everyman," Dick's drug-addled antihero must come to grips with a society where, as the movie's tag-line makes clear, "everything is not going to be OK."
While it's virtually guaranteed to achieve some kind of cult status, A Scanner Darkly lacks the paranoid intensity of Dick's novel, and Linklater's established penchant for loose and loopy dialogue doesn't always work here, with an emphasis on drug-culture humor instead of the panicked anxiety that Dick's novel conveys. As for the use of "interpolated rotoscoping"--the technique used to apply shifting, highly stylized animation over conventional live-action footage--it's purely a matter of personal preference. The film's look is appropriate to Dick's dark, cautionary story about the high price of addiction, but it also robs performances of nuance and turns the seriousness of Dick's story into... well, a cartoon. Opinions will differ, but A Scanner Darkly is definitely worth a look--or two, if the mind-rattling plot doesn't sink in the first time around. --Jeff Shannon
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Mind-Blowing,
By
This review is from: A Scanner Darkly [Blu-ray] [2006] [US Import] (Blu-ray)
The film is ok, it's pretty interesting but I'm going to talk about the High-Definition features:
Visual: Incredible. I don't really need to expand on that, but I will. The sharpness, colour and level of detail is mind-blowing. This is definitely a film to showcase the quality of High Definition! The work that's gone into this film is incredible and it really makes the end-piece fantastic to watch. Audio: The audio is solid, well delivered and equalised. There's nothing wrong in this department. Features: You get a commentary with Linklater and Reeves which is ok, if a little boring. The real juicy bits are the two long documentaries supplementing the film. The first is an indepth of how the film was adapted from the book, with cast and crew interviews including the author of the original book! My favourite extra feature is the 'How we did it' supplement; where the crew show us how they went about creating the cartoon from the original video source, and interviews with the cinematographer. Also to note is that this Blu Ray disc is REGIONLESS, so it will work on UK PS3s and Blu Ray players as well. Overall, a welcome addition to the blu-ray franchise and certainly a film to showcase High Definition's potential. Hope this helps.
53 of 60 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Clearly, or darkly?,
By
This review is from: A Scanner Darkly [DVD] [2006] (DVD)
A Scanner Darkly was my first Phillip K. Dick novel, and was a surprisingly difficult read. Difficult not just to get a fix on his writing style but to get my head around what Dick was trying to say. In the end though, it was worth it, being one of those experiences where the moment the last page turns, the realisation comes of how profoundly brilliant and unexpected the entire thing has been.
The film strays very little from the book; in fact, `straying' is the wrong word, as Linklater has really gone all out to be faithful to the original story here, with an obvious and unflagging respect. In the name of continuity one can appreciate that some changes were necessary, for example, the complete omission of the character of Jerry Fabin, instead coalescing he and Charles Freck into the one body, but none that will permit anyone to moan. Most of the big scenes from the book are here, gloriously visual, and the ones that while missing, are not missed (for example, Arctor's visit to an abusive drug dealer's girl). The film, while by no means short, does seem to be truncated in a way that hampers the progression of the story. Arctor's mental descent was a huge part of the novel, with many mind-boggling pages spent following the slow death of his brain cells and the gradual division of his brain from his mind and his mind from his ability to live. The film doesn't give a different version of events, but how quickly it all occurs gives a feeling of slight uneasiness and all seems just a little off-kilter. Perhaps this is a blessing after all, as Linklater could easily have decided to go down the time-ignorant route and spent a good fifteen minutes devoted to artistic shots and meaningless, predictable, endless prose as Arctor's world unravels. A Scanner Darkly is about a number of things, namely drug addiction, relationships and their ensuing fragility, state control, corruption, ends justifying the means and personal hell, but comes nowhere close to being a lecture in morality. It is one of Dick's most personal pieces of writing, and I don't believe he was really trying to say anything, just to tell a story; people's stories that, while packaged in a box that screams the colours of science-fiction, are far from complete works of fiction.
10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A scanner closely,
By Bill (Cornwall, UK) - See all my reviews
This review is from: A Scanner Darkly [DVD] [2006] (DVD)
All in all, this is one of the better film adaptations of Dick's work, although probably for aficionados only; the uninitiated would almost certainly be confused and exasperated.
It follows the novel closely, and the rotoscoping is effective and unsettling, especially when depicting Arctor's 'scramble suit'. But the animation is, oddly, let down by the acting; Rory Cochrane is over-the-top as Freck, and Barris, whilst suitably sinister, is often unintelligible thanks to Downey's rapid, mumbled delivery. Keanu Reeves puts in a solid, tortured performance, and we warm to Winona Ryder's Donna as the film progresses. But somehow the film fails to successfully capture Arctor's growing paranoia and his tenuous hold on reality, or the hopelessness felt by all the characters as they wander, drug-addled, though a surreal Californian suburban landscape. Dick has not been well served by Hollywood. Even Blade Runner only scratched the surface of the complex novel on which it was based, and others, like Total Recall or Paycheck, come nowhere close. Minority Report was surprisingly faithful to Dick's short story, although lost several brownie points for (a) starring Tom Cruise; and (b) a predictable dose of Spielberg sentimentality at the end. One day, maybe, someone will make a film of a PKD novel which actually works, one which captures the freewheeling weirdness of his plots, without losing their humour and essential metaphysical content - Ubik, possibly, or even Palmer Eldritch. But I'm not holding my breath.
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