ScreenWize

The novels and short stories of Philip K. Dick have been fertile ground for filmmakers over the years (Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report to name a few) and A Scanner Darkly shares Dick’s common themes of a future filled with dark surrealism and uncertainty. It differs however as a difficult and deeply personal story, inspired by years of his own drug use, rehabilitation and sense of paranoia. With the film version, Director Richard Linklater has remained mostly faithful to the book, updating it from 1994 to “seven years from now.” Linklater has also used interpolated rotoscoping to animate the film, giving it the look of a liquid graphic novel. Rotoscoping involves filming and editing the movie in a traditional way, and then processing every frame to render it as a 2D animation.

The future in the film is a world where 25% of the population has become addicted to Substance D, a deadly narcotic developed from small blue flowers, and where the State’s surveillance systems track every move. Bob Arctor (Keanu Reeves) is an undercover cop living with a group of psychotic drug users in an attempt to find out more information about where the stuff comes from. To do his job convincingly Arctor takes the drug himself and it begins to distort his own sense of reality. Back at police headquarters, he watches surveillance tapes of his own life in the scanner, but these only seem to make things worse. He’s not sure what to make of his spaced out house mates Jim (Robert Downer Jr.) Ernie (Woody Harrelson) and drug dealing Donna (Winona Ryder).

Despite all the drugs, the film never quite soars. The fascinating and eerily disorientating rotoscoping can’t cover up a script that’ s often verbose and frequently marking time. Paranoid characters are never the best of company – especially when as limp as Keany Reeves’ Bob – because they can never make sense of things. Linklater therefore has to join the dots by using lacklustre explanatory dialogue. To compensate there are some very funny scenes – especially with Downer and Harrelson bringing to mad life the verbose Jim and the emotional Ernie. But these are verbal sketches, filling up the space where the story should be, where an urgent expressive paranoia could have driven the plot harder and faster. Ultimately, Dick’s painful vision of a world of divided consciousness never emerges through all the words.

Rating:

Filed Under: Reviews by Simon