thisanant
wow! what a work! i still don't know the genre , maybe it is animation/live action or something i don't know. what i do know is this -"THIS IS EXTRAORDINARY." the story is pure but the highlight is the performance of the cast , they are splendid , this doesn't feel like a movie , it is real . SUPERPS it is hilarious a lot of times too!
The Squeerelist
The story of A Scanner Darkly has never seemed more relevant than today. Director/Screenwriter Richard Linklater adapts here the work of Philip K. Dick and his original reflexion on government with this non-typical sci-fi piece. It deals with social issues, surveillance and drug-caused paranoia while abandoning the usual features of sci-fi spectacular like spaceships and other aliens. I am truly impressed by the vision of Linklater who literally made 2 movies. The first one was shot like a normal feature-film and the second movie was made by animators and drawers who painted over each and every frame of the first movie. The animation crew worked for 18 months: that's more than 350 man-hour per minute of film you will watch. You should watch A Scanner Darkly even only out of respect for the creation process and the originality of the project. Linklater turns the psychotic fate of an undercover cop into a dark comedy. Behind the drug addiction, the governmental surveillance, and the paranoia of its characters, A Scanner Darkly is definitely funny. Keanu Reeves who plays (once again) the misfit hero is actually not the best character of the story. Woody Harrelson, on the other hand, is a total blast. But in my opinion, Robert Downey Jr. totally steals the screen with his interpretation of the eloquent and sciency junkie. Winona Ryder is mysterious and Rory Cochrane is the psychotic druggie of the crew that loses it the most (he is exceptional too). I admire the artwork of the movie that makes me think of a complex underground graphic novel minus the geeky superheros. I feel that the characters are as normal as they can be considering they've been brain-damaged by the highly addictive 'substance D': yes, they are paranoid and have no future but they are also relatable which is the key to a good sci-fi movie. I believe good sci-fi is credible sci-fi. A Scanner Darkly is incredibly credible and can be adapted to any era: it worked back in the 70s and it works now more than ever.1 reason to watch: The 'Scramble-suit'!Read it here: http://squeerelist.blogspot.com/2013/05/a-scanner-darkly- 2006.html
vitachiel
It's easier to criticize a movie than to praise one. This movie deserves to be criticized. The people who worked on this film can be expected to be uninnovative. OK, maybe they thought it original to use this drawing effect. The thing is that nobody is stupid enough to use such a lousy effect for the duration of a whole picture.The choice of the cast says enough, and we'll have to go through all of it again: Robert Downey Jr. in his usual mannerism mode, Keanu Reeves as the no-talent superficial dude and Woody Harrelson - who in my opinion is a rather fine actor - shines here as the most annoying character in the movie, some kind of unbelievable smart-ass, childish stoner 'freak'.The story? A mix of science fiction, drug-related crime and comedy make for a boring ride, complete with undercover cops wearing automatically changing content suits. Yeah, right...
welshcheese
I finished reading the book and later that day watched the film.I felt that it would be very hard to make the book in to a film due to the amount of narrative, but we have CGI and talent and money, so why not? I watched it with someone who had not read the book, and they thought they had fallen asleep in the middle and missed a bit. They had not, and found it totally confusing.I felt the funny/drug parts of the book were included in the film to help it sell, and the substance of the book was omitted.The original story is a sine wave with peaks of fun and troughs of dark paranoia, becoming more amplified as time goes on. This gave the story flow and a direction which made sense leading us to the conclusion.The film brought to life everything I imagined from the book, but lacked in depth and complexities. This prevented the many layers of paranoia and therefore gradual loss of reality being laid on top of each other, thus losing the building tension that is in the book.This should have been an Apocalypse Now length film, without the added animation effect, and the rest of the original story included. I felt the director got in to the heads of all the characters in the book fully, except for Arctors'.Perhaps you need to have been to darker side of your mind, to recognise it and therefore portray this in the film.You cant make a film just using the 'best bits' of a PKD book as it obviously doesn't work
AD
