One of the good things about the place we stayed at on vacation compared to the place the previous two times was the having a DVD player. So while there, Marcia and I watched “A Scanner Darkly” (thanks to her sister Paula bringing it), based on the Philip K. Dick’s novel of the same name, and starring Keanu Reeves, Winona Ryder, Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson, and Rory Cochrane.
From Amazon.Com, here is a description of the movie plot:
The drug war’s been lost, citizens are kept under rigid surveillance by holographic scanning recorders, and a schizoid addict named Bob Arctor (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 (Harrelson, Ryder, Cochrane, and 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.”
It is nice to see a recent surge of interest in Dick’s work being made into movies. I personally haven’t read any of his novels, but I know the respect he has in the science fiction field, and how he pushed the envelope when he was writing (he died in 1982 at the age of 53). One main theme in most of Dick’s work is paranoia. There seems to be ample amounts of it in the movie, yet those that have read the book feels that it is lacking. I can only imagine what the book is like (gonna have to read it).
One of the biggest parts of this movie is the presentation. The movie was filmed digitally and then animated over using interpolated rotoscope. It gave the opportunity to use other animation to add to the film, like at the very beginning of the film where Freck (Cochrane) has bugs crawling all over him and his dog, only to find out that they are a hallucination due to his drug use. It also helped in making the scramble suit work.
One issue that I have with the movie is Fred/Arctor’s issue of having a split personality. It is hard to pick up on. It almost seemed that he knew who he was and that he was just playing the game to go undercover. I thought the idea of the plot was that he is struggling back and forth on what to do with himself and what path he wants to take, how he might forget that he is Arctor, and how the boundaries were blurring because of the drug use. Either way, it still made for an interesting movie, but I guess to me missed the point it was trying to make.
Downey Jr. and Harrelson did rather well in their roles. I think Downey Jr. more so, but it was interesting watching them with Reeves during the more paranoid moments of the movie. Cochrane was a nice treat. His character, along with the animation, was excellent.
Overall, it was a great movie, and not heavy on sci-fi so that non-fans can enjoy it. But not just being a sci-fi story was Dick’s intention with the book and his other work.
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