#ascannerdarkly

Excessively wordy and disorienting but also visually distinct, interesting, and capturing its subject matter perfectly, A Scanner Darkly is not an entirely successful experiment, but I say it’s worth seeing. You’ll notice immediately that the film is “animated” in the sense that it was shot with cameras. Then the actors were rotoscoped (traced) digitally to create a realistic and visually distinct style but don’t mistake this for a children’s film.

Set in the near future, Bob Arctor (Keanu Reeves) is an undercover agent of the United States government. His mission is to track down the source of a drug 20% of the population is addicted to: a hallucinogen called Substance D. Using a camouflage suit that prevents his identity from being known by anyone - even his superiors - Arctor lives in a small house with two addict roommates, Luckman (Woody Harrelson) and Barris (Robert Downey Jr.). Part of his cover also means he uses Substance D as well. When Arctor receives a lead on someone high on the supply chain, he is shocked to discover it's his own undercover identity he's supposed to look for.

You can tell Richard Linklater loves the material he’s basing his film upon even if you miss his screenplay writing credit. I haven’t read Philip K. Dick’s novel, but it feels like no bits of dialogue have been omitted. It’s not that the film is necessarily excessively long, but there are a lot of talky scenes and little action. I understand the thought process but it’s not what most people would've done, for good reason.

A Scanner Darkly is about drug addicts. Their semi-sensical ramblings, their strange leaps of logic, their difficulty connecting dots… it’s perfect. While this helps ease you into this world and helps you wrap your head around what’s going on in the mind of our main character, it also works against you. The hallucinations Arctor and the others experience are weird, but they’re nowhere near as weird as they should be, particularly not considering the animated medium. This is one of the most visually distinct drug-related films I’ve seen, though the way it fails to fully take advantage of its medium makes you wonder if it even needed to be animated. Most of the drug trips taken by Arctor, his roommates, or his “girlfriend” Donna (Winona Ryder) don't actually show much. You want to see "Pink Elephants on Parade" but you don't.

What makes me recommend the movie is the source material. Though dialogue-heavy, it’s very well written. The plot is gripping and the ending packs a punch. The conclusion turns everything you thought you knew upside down. You have to re-think everything you saw earlier, which makes it memorable. The casting is perfect. The performances are quite good. As a man forced to investigate himself while zapping away his own brain cells, Keanu Reeves he’s perfect.

A Scanner Darkly is more of an interesting experiment than anything and there are several other things that rubbed me the wrong way, such as an unnecessary quote at the end of the film and the visuals of the “scramble suits” that doesn’t really work (though they still look cool). Nevertheless, it works more than it doesn’t and I think some people will absolutely love or find something of value to "steal" from it. (On DVD, September 10, 2015)