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A Scanner Darkly

Review By: Ryan Piccirillo
RyanPiccirillo@TheCinemaSource.com

There’s not much worse than hard work not paying off. Richard Linklater’s rotoscoping technology is a painstaking process only the most patient of us can tackle. Taking up to 500 hours of animating over real footage for only one minute of final product is not for the easily frustrated. When critics begin their relentless slaughter of your baby, you have to wonder to yourself, “Was it worth the 15 months?”

A Scanner Darkly is Linklater’s second rotoscoped feature film (Waking Life was his first). Based on the book written by the movie industry’s favorite sci-fi writer, Philip K. Dick, the film is a startling rendition. So important to Linklater was staying true to the story that it probably weakened what would be an otherwise pretty good movie.

Darkly is a tale not as unreasonable as you might expect from the typical futuristic, sci-fi film. It is an offbeat examination of the social and political entanglement with drugs and surveillance. There would be no better time than now, what with the Patriot Act and the frivolous War on Drugs, to speak out with a voice that carries. Linklater’s voice just doesn’t. It becomes trapped and muffled by his concern with staying faithful. The book’s atmosphere and sentiment work well in the movie, but the sociopolitical implications are lazy in their critique of our world today. They are almost intangible and float daintily over us. But at least it gets our minds working in that direction.

Linklater’s world is not impossibly vivid and twisted. The rules are not unlike ours, especially when you throw in the paranoia of drugs, but it leaves up to our imagination what should have been in plain sight. The story’s Substance D holds drug effects that are all-encompassing and powerfully damaging to the brain, yet we hardly ever trade eyes with the addict. Rotoscoping allows for an all-out freak-out of hallucinatory madness. In only a small handful of scenes do we get a glimpse into their psychedelic world. Instead, the narrative can’t seem to decide which point of view to take on. At one point we’re on the outside observing the self-destruction, and at others we see through the drug abuser’s eyes.

The opening scene immediately challenges us when Charles Freck (Rory Cochrane) panics to shake off an endless crawl of insects. We find that it was just a reaction to Substance D, but at the time there was no telling what was going on.