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A Scanner Darkly |
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 Release Date: 07/07/06 (Future Release)
Starring: Keanu Reeves, Winona Ryder, Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson, Rory Cochrane
Director: Richard Linklater
Rating: (R) |
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Genre |
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Animation, Drama, SciFi/Fantasy |
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Running Time |
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100 min |
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Distributor |
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Warner Independent Pictures |
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 Official Website |
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NEW YORK REVIEW
Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly is the most faithful film adaptation ever of a Philip K. Dick novel—and also, strangely, the most muted. It’s a pity it doesn’t have more oomph, because the book is arguably Dick’s masterpiece, and as brain-rattling today as when it came out in 1977. The protagonist is a deep-cover agent living among addicts of Substance D, a hallucinogen with amphetamine-like properties. The twist is that his superiors don’t know his true identity—he visits them wearing a “scramble suit.” As his sense of reality begins to splinter from drug abuse, he’s ordered to spy onhimself; and so many of Dick’s pet themes coalesce—the mutability of identity, the fear of government, and the ability of drugs both to liberate the mind and destroy it.
As in Waking Life, Linklater uses “interpolated rotoscoping”: He shoots the film with real actors (here they include Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., and Winona Ryder) and then animates them-the upshot being that all the outlines wiggle, the molecules of reality in constant motion. It’s the perfect language for Dick, but just when the film should take off into the delusional-paranoid ether, it becomes rather static and remote. It’s terribly frustrating when one’s Dick is at arm’s length.— Reviewed by David Edelstein, New York Magazine
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