“I hope for everyone’s sake the scanners do better, because if the scanner sees only darkly the way I do, then I’m cursed and cursed again.”

Justin’s rating: Substance Dubstep was the worst of them all

Justin’s review: “Seven years from now” the U.S. has lost the war on drugs in the worst of all ways. A full fifth of the population is addicted to Substance D, creating an epidemic that’s sent the country spiraling into a police surveillance state. Part of that police state is an undercover cop code-named Fred (Keanu Reeves), who gets addicted to D in order to find the source of the drug’s production.

Tripping out of his mind and disillusioned with the government for which he works, Fred struggles to balance his job and the people he cares for in his undercover life. This includes his love interest and drug dealer Donna (Winona Ryder) and his two stoner roommates (Woody Harrelson and Robert Downey Jr.).

But who is Fred, really? With all of the drugs messing with his mind, his identities being swapped as easily as putting on a different suit, and with his friends and superiors using him for their own purposes, it’s impossible for him to tell — never mind we the viewing audience. And if that’s not crazy enough, the cops end up putting Fred on a surveillance detail… watching himself.

The first thing that you’ll notice about A Scanner Darkly is its animation style. As with Director Richard Linkletter’s earlier Waking Life, he filmed the movie with live actors and then rotoscoped it frame by frame.

The result is an animated movie where you can feel the realism hiding just below the surface as the rotoscoping slips and slides off of real objects. It’s visually captivating but also kind of creepy. Seeing actors like Reeves, Ryder, and Downey Jr. rotoscoped is more distracting than immersing.

After that, the second thing that pops out is the near-future scifi dystopia that A Scanner Darkly brings to life. Nearly all of the tech here isn’t for the betterment of humanity but for its subjugation. Even the “scramble suit” that Fred wears in the police station to hide his visual and audio identity to other cops keeps him isolated and miserable. Philip K. Dick showed some acute prescience when he wrote this story back in the ’70s.

While I like a good scifi head trip as any other PKD fan, I found my enthusiasm muted somewhat by the drug angle. The unreliable narrator that is extended drug trips in films is similar to any movie that loves shoving dream sequences in our face. It always feels like a waste of time to me.

So I’m almost right in the middle on A Scanner Darkly. It’s certainly not the kind of movie — in the visual or narrative department — that you often see, and that unique flavor has an appeal. It’s just a shame that all of this effort is being expended on a gussied-up undercover cop-goes-too-deep tale.

Intermission!

• Bugs all over you is the best way to start any movie
• The scramble suit is crazy to look at
• About time a movie fast-forwarded the boring parts
• What did happen to the missing gears of the bike? WHAT HAPPENEDED?
• “Let’s go rescue the orphan gears!”
• That silencer augmented the sound
• A bow without an arrow isn’t a good home defense object
• Metal cleats, not plastic