Substance D is an illegal drug that has flooded the streets, and over 20% of the population has become hooked on it. But there are those who wanna put an end to the drug as well, and one of those is Bob Arctor, who's an undercover cop in Orange County, California. Arctor is ordered to spy on his addicted friends, but is a drug-addict as well, and ends up having a paranoid journey.
There are already tons of reviews for A Scanner Darkly on the net, so I'm just gonna keep it quite short and simple here, and not go into too much detail since there are loads of reviewers who has already done that, and frankly, it's starting to become a bit boring. So let's start with the animation, and when I thought about it after seeing the film, I found different ways on how to look at it, both good and not so good. A word to describe it with is cool, cos seriously, it looks really cool, actually it looks so cool that it takes focus away from the movie itself and the story. For a while in the beginning of the flick, I found myself to be too caught up in the animation, and what everything looked like, that I actually missed out on the story, and so I had to rewind and watch it again. I'm not kidding.
But after a while you got used to it, the animation that is, and so you could focus more on the actual story, which is a story based on an autobiographical novel by Philip K. Dick. I guess the story itself was pretty good, at least I had no problem finding the movie to be quite interesting. But on the other hand, if it wouldn't have been for the animation, I'm not sure it would've been half as good. I mean now it's special because of that it's animated, but if you took the animation off, would it really have anything special to it then? Honestly, I don't really think so, the animation is at least half the thing, if not more.
As far as the animation goes, it looks awesome, and that's reason enough to watch it, just to see how cool it looks. Other than that, once you get into the story, it pretty much does the job too. The acting is good and Keanu Reeves is actually not bad at all, and not really as stiff as normal which was a nice change. I'm not a fan of Robert Downey Jr and all of his chatter here (most of it of the pointless kind) kinda made your brain hurt at times. Woody Harrelson plays a guy who's kinda confused, and was pretty good to watch with him being slightly over-the-top, but it sure worked all right. Winona Ryder also appears in the movie, and is pretty good even if she doesn't "steal" the show.
At times A Scanner Darkly made you think about such movies as Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, Spun and last but not least, Requiem For A Dream. Biggest reason for that is that they all deal with drugs, but it has a bit more to it than that, it's hard to explain, but basically it was just the very feel itself. It also featured some humour which worked pretty well, and then there were a helluva lot of chattier parts. Good thing though during these chattier parts was that then you could focus on the animation instead, so at least that gave you something to do. Don't get me wrong here, as these parts also has some good dialogue to offer, but a lot of them felt kinda meaningless, and it's just like they're talking for the sake of talking, and what comes out is neither very interesting or important.
I think A Scanner Darkly is the type of movie that kinda requires a second viewing, as it was just too easy to get caught up in the animation, and at the same time miss out on a lot of stuff that happened the first time watching it. It looks really great, and that alone is reason enough to take a look at it. But except for the fact that it looks cool, it was also, all in all, a pretty good flick. Recommended.
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ALTERNATIVE TITLE:
MOVIE YEAR: 2006
DIRECTOR: Richard Linklater
WRITING CREDITS: Philip K. Dick, Richard Linklater
GENRE: Animation, Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller
CAST: Robert Downey Jr, Keanu Reeves, Woody Harrelson
COUNTRY: USA
RUNTIME: 100 min
RATING: 7/10
A Scanner Darkly Website/IMDB Click here
A Scanner Darkly Trailer Click here
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