A Scanner Darkly

Before seeing A Scanner Darkly I had only seen the images of the strange and unique style the film had adopted and heard briefly that it was based on a Phillip K Dick novel. Being an animator myself I was very interested in seeing the film simply from a design aspect, but I soon found that the story and the ideas themselves were worthwile reasons to go and see this delightfully strange piece of cinema. The serious topic of drug abuse could have been a heavy weight upon the plot, but instead it was quite witty and funny, the bizzare turns in the story creating quite a comical element. Robert Downey Jnr and Woody Harrelson are especially amusing, Keanu Reeves taking a more central role as the figure the audience most closely follows.

The plot is purposely incoherent for a specific reason, which if you've seen the film or read the book you'd know of, and once you discover why nothing seems to make sense, everything comes very neatly together and the story becomes very meaningful and intelligent. The moment of realisation as to what's going on is a brilliant aspect of the film and is the definite highlight of the movie.

I like the style of the film very much, adopting almost the image of a flash animation which allows certain aspects to really shine. The indentity scattering suits looks brilliant in the cartoon-like style, other highlights are the bizzare interdimensional alien in one hallucination and the strange shift between Wiona Rider's character and another woman while she sleeps.

This is a very cool film, even Keanu Reeves didn't let the it down, when in some movies his acting has failed to impress in A Scanner Darkly he fitted the role quite well indeed.