Review of Scanners (1981) by Stephen M — 21 Oct 2008

A shadowy organisation recruits a powerful telepath (Stephen Lack) to find and neutralise an equally powerful telepath (Michael Ironside) with world domination on his mind. I must have seen Scanners half a dozen times over the years, and every time I've watched it I've enjoyed it less than I thought I would. I read that it was greenlighted and rushed into production very quickly, without a proper script, and it really does show. The important scenes are all there, but the transitional material threading them all together is perfunctory in the extreme, making the movie relatively fast-paced but difficult to follow; it's like a join-the-dots picture, done in invisible ink!

This lack of connective substance also has the effect of making the hero's investigation seem far too straightforward. For instance, at one point he chances upon a drug vial with a mysterious corporate logo on it, and in the very next scene he's already managed to infiltrate the laboratory that produced it. Cronenberg wraps things up with a piece of logic straight out of the James Bond book of spying: if you snoop around long enough you will eventually be shot with a tranquilliser dart, waking up exactly where you need to be, just in time for the final showdown.

Unusually for Cronenberg, Scanners doesn't even have the saving grace of originality on its side; utilising the same theme - telepaths, exploited by sinister agencies as potential weapons - De Palma's superior The Fury beat Scanners to the screen by nearly three years, and even the soft and cuddly Star Wars saga has a thread of parapsychology running through it. On the subject of Star Wars, the genealogical soap-operatics at the end of Scanners resemble those of The Empire Strikes Back!