Review of A Scanner Darkly (2006) by Raisul I — 30 Jun 2013

This is a very dark movie that delves into the topics of addiction, paranoia, and depression but does it in a unique way using a different kind of animation. The actors are really on screen, moving, walking and talking, but they seem to be draped in an animated covering. Most of the sets and locations seemed to be real and authentic but certain details were scribbled in the background for example, the signs on the interstate were handwritten in an elementary font. I can appreciate Linklater's attempt to craft the film in this way, but after watching it I felt like it would have been ten times more powerful of a film if it was filmed live. After watching it again, I may think differently about this.

The twist that A Scanner Darkly offers is the NSA-style surveillance that the Federal, State, and Local police partake in to criminalize the addicts in order to locate large amounts of the newest drug, "Substance D". How relevant is this story today with Eric Snowden's recent leaks about the U.S. Government infringing on our public and private lives for their own interests. There was a scene where an agent was listening in on a Keanu Reeves phone call and from her computer screen, she was able to track down where he was, who he was talking to, and get visuals of their faces and live video of them on the streets. When Reeves and Rider used a few trigger words that referenced Substance D, there was an option on the screen to warrant an arrest or not. Because the amount of drugs they were referencing was so small, they passed on this arrest. But that is frighteningly relevant to the kind of monitoring activities that is happening today in our world.

Keanu Reeves is an undercover agent working for the local police and is assigned to report on his friends, Woody Harrelson, Winona Rider, and Robert Downey Jr. These four are the oddest bunch and a joy to watch together. This is another reason why I wish this movie were filmed regularly because Robert Downey and Woody Harrelson were so funny, there performances were so memorable, being animated, it was almost as if they weren't even there. Those two together made each other better. Being animated or faux-animated took away from this Hollywood pairing that we don't get to see very often.

The scanner suit that Reeves, and the other undercover narc's wore was a little much to process as the viewer. The concept for the undetectable suit was great but I don't think it worked that well being animated. How would it have been done in live action? I don't know, but I think it would have been easier to digest for us the audience.

Rory Cochrane who played the friend who was just too strung out and paranoid to fit in was very funny. His facial expressions and jerk-like body movements were hauntingly funny. You want to feel bad for him but you can't help but find humor in his movements. He eventually committed suicide which was narrated in short-story format involving an extraterrestrial being reading him every sin he had committed since he's been alive. Again, the animation took away from Cochrane's performance. If it were live, people may have referenced it and noticed it more.

The film is dark, and depressing. Its take on the future, "seven years from now" could very well still be 7 years from today. The current trend of technology in today's market, (phones that stare back at you and turn off when you look away, GPS and social networking devices letting everyone know where you are all the time), spell out that this kind of future is not all that unrealistic. The War on Drugs is a term I don't hear quoted in the press too often anymore, but that doesn't mean that this "War" has faded away. America continues to be the most uncompassionate country in the world when it comes to drug addiction and mental illness. Drugs and mental health issues have increased our incarceration amounts to an uncanny number. Highest in the world by far. There is no understanding and little attempts to understand the complex nature and root causes of the afflicted. What American politicians and corporations like "New Path" in A Scanner Darkly understand is profit. Flood the streets with weapons and drugs so we can make money from incarceration and justify beefing up our national security and isolating us from the rest of the world. It is unfair the way things are playing out in this country and that makes this movie fit with the times.

The image of a mind-dead Reeves alone in the field, laboring for New Path, the government-contracted company, trying to figure out how things fell apart is unfair to him and far too real. He discovered fields of blue flowers hidden in the corn fields that he was spraying that seemed to be a secret stock of Substance D that the government was harvesting to distribute but he was no longer in a position to make any sense of it or do anything about it at all. As the viewer, your not even sure if those flowers were real or not. They could be just as imaginative as the bugs were that were crawling all over Freck's body in the beginning. Linklater ended the movie with a touching elegy dedicated to the drug addicted people he knew and still suffer from their own illnesses and from the mistreatment from authority.

I can't get over the fact that this film has all the elements and potential to have been a Fight club-caliber Hollywood film if it weren't weirdly animated. But it wasn't designed to be. It was purposely made the way it was to be released under the radar and make people think about society today. I own the movie now so I wonder how much my views will shape up after few more screenings.

4/5.