A Scanner Darkly [HD DVD]

Average customer rating: 3.5

Cool but strange
so it aint a gimick after all.
Desolation, Inc.
awesome movie
not very good

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A Scanner Darkly [HD DVD]
Starring: Rory Cochrane , Jr. Robert Downey , Woody Harrelson , Marco Perella , and Turk Pipkin
Manufacturer: Warner Home Video
Product Group: DVD
Binding: HD DVD
ASIN: B000NOKJFO
2007-04-10

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How well you respond to Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly depends on how much you know about the life and work of celebrated science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. While it qualifies as a faithful adaptation of Dick's semiautobiographical 1977 novel about the perils of drug abuse, Big Brother-like surveillance and rampant paranoia in a very near future ("seven years from now"), this is still very much a Linklater film, and those two qualities don't always connect effectively. The creepy potency of Dick's premise remains: The drug war's been lost, citizens are kept under rigid surveillance by holographic scanning recorders, and a schizoid addict named Bob Arctor (Keanu Reeves) is facing an identity crisis he's not even aware of: Due to his voluminous intake of the highly addictive psychotropic drug Substance D, Arctor's brain has been split in two, each hemisphere functioning separately. So he doesn't know that he's also Agent Fred, an undercover agent assigned to infiltrate Arctor's circle of friends (played by Woody Harrelson, Winona Ryder, Rory Cochrane, and Robert Downey, Jr.) to track down the secret source of Substance D. As he wears a "scramble suit" that constantly shifts identities and renders Agent Fred/Arctor into "the ultimate everyman," Dick's drug-addled antihero must come to grips with a society where, as the movie's tag-line makes clear, "everything is not going to be OK."

While it's virtually guaranteed to achieve some kind of cult status, A Scanner Darkly lacks the paranoid intensity of Dick's novel, and Linklater's established penchant for loose and loopy dialogue doesn't always work here, with an emphasis on drug-culture humor instead of the panicked anxiety that Dick's novel conveys. As for the use of "interpolated rotoscoping"--the technique used to apply shifting, highly stylized animation over conventional live-action footage--it's purely a matter of personal preference. The film's look is appropriate to Dick's dark, cautionary story about the high price of addiction, but it also robs performances of nuance and turns the seriousness of Dick's story into... well, a cartoon. Opinions will differ, but A Scanner Darkly is definitely worth a look--or two, if the mind-rattling plot doesn't sink in the first time around. --Jeff Shannon

Description

Set in a not-too-distant future where America has lost its "war" on drugs, Fred, an undercover cop, is one of many people hooked on the popular drug, Substance D, which causes its users to develop split personalities. Fred is obsessed with taking down Bob, a notorious drug dealer, but due to his Substance D addiction, he does not know that he is also Bob. Based on a classic novel by Philip K. Dick. Starring Keanu Reeves ("Constantine," "The Matrix" trilogy), Academy Award-nominee and Golden Globe-winner Winona Ryder ("Girl, Interupted," "Mr. Deeds"), Academy Award and Emmy-nominee and Golden Globe-winner Robert Downey Jr. ("Good Night, And Good Luck" "Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang"), and Academy Award and Golden Globe-nominee and Emmy-winner Woody Harrelson ("North Country," "The People vs. Larry Flynt"). Directed by Academy Award-nominee Richard Linklater ("Before Sunset," "Dazed and Confused"). Filmed in live-action, and then animated using the same critically acclaimed process that Linklater used in his previous film, "Waking Life."

Customer Reviews:

Cool but strange.......2007-06-13

Very entertaining which is what you pay for, right ?
The special effects are great.
You really can't go wrong with a Phillip K. Dick story.
The acting is pretty good ....
Keanu gets an 7
Robert Downey gets an 8 - pretty quirky
Woody Harrelson gets a 6 - you don't really believe his performance

so it aint a gimick after all........2007-06-07

i remember seeing a trailer for this and was somewhat hesitant to see it in theaters (in no small part because of my distance from a theater that would show it), but this movie popped out on store shelves right around the time i was required to a solo assingment on a movie for my Cinema Class at college (which by its very nature means that it has to be an art movie, which also means that 98% of normal people would never bother seeing). picked up first as a rental and the day i turned in the paper i went back and bought it.

i take quite a bit of this movie to heart because my brother has and is going through a process to kick his addictiosn to various illegal drugs, and the fact that he now lives in the area the movie is shot in (Orange County, California).

it takes place about 7 years from now. Substance D is the new drug of choice for alot of people, and is the most destructive thing ever seen on this earth. 20% of all people are classified as addicts. Bob Arctor (played by Keanu Reeves) leads a double life, one is his regular job as an auto-mechanic and roomies with his other Substance friends, and his other is Undercover Narcotics Officer Fred, in which he must wear the Scramble suit, which projects flashes of thousands of different people around the person wearing so that thier identity is kept secret. Arctor is trying to find a major drug dealer in the OC area through his girlfriend, who also uses D and has a fear of physical contact.

at first i believed the Rotoscoping technique that was used on the movie was merely a gimmick and editing tool to get me in the theater (had there been a theater nearby that shown it, it woulda worked too). but once you start to see the movie its apparent why. one of the things that occurs to those who use and abuse Substance D is a disconnect between the hemispheres of the brain, which causes peole to see things different or not at all (in one scene the camera is on a black male doctor and his associate, than to arctor, it jumps back to where the two doctors were and the doctor is now female and the associate is different as well), which naturallly makes them question what is real or not. the rotoscoping technique does this as well, where in certain scenes and places (mostly in the background and more important scenes) the ammount of layering is coloration is increased to make it seem more realistic, and others its easily distinguishable. so you the viewer also have trouble distinguishing real from not-real. also the Scrable Suit naturaly requires rotoscoping just by the nature of how it works (common technology is nowhere close to that kind of skill had it been live action), but it also serves as a bit of a metaphor. the actors in this movie (and most movies) rely heavily on make-up and various post-production effects to "enchance" things. as BoB Arctor is hidden behind modern technology to hide thier true identity, so do the actors who are being rotoscoped, as well as several actors in movie-making as a whole. it also serves as a metaphor into how increasingly paranoid we as a people are becoming about who we let in.

Desolation, Inc........2007-06-05

A Scanner Darkly is a masterpeice of storytelling and I'm sure Phillip K. Dick would be very proud of this movie. The animation and the rotoscoping technique maybe a gimmick, but it works. The scramble suits, what can you say? They are in a pyschedelic class by themselves.
This is the best acting performance of Keanu Reeves career and his supporting cast is equal to the task. Kudos to all of them, especially Winona Ryder.
Lastly, thank you Richard Linkletter, it is only right that the filmmaker that gave us Slacker and Dazed and Confused would create this tribute to those who have fallen before.

awesome movie.......2007-05-30

Great movie didn't have any problems running it on the xbox 360 hd-dvd add-on. The movie is great and the making off makes the movie worth buying.

not very good.......2007-05-25

I had high expectations but had to turn it off halfway through. Story was going nowhere....

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