Went to see this movie with CDMCC and Elizabeth last night. We were planning to watch it on the east side, but apparently it’s only playing in one theater in all of Seattle. Guess it’s apparently playing in limited theaters across the country. There was a big line when we went last night.
Official Site
IMDb: 7.7/10 (374 votes)
Yahoo! Movies: The Critics: B- / Yahoo! Users: B+
Rotten Tomatoes: Rating: 66% / Average Rating 6.4/10
Apple Trailer
Amazon.com Soundtrack
Amazon.com Showtimes
Amazon.com DVD
Spoilers: (Show)
The movie had many confusing parts, but the overall story wasn’t hard to understand. The movie was completely done in Rotoscoping, which had a neat effect, that emphasized what the director wanted.
This is in a world of today where Substance D (which I can only think is a reference to E – ecstasy) is a highly addictive drug which everyone wants to stop. However, in this society, government control is complete and there’s no disobeying the government. Undercover cops also have these suits they were to prevent leaking of their identification. I always thought that was weird because the only people you’ll be hiding from are the police. Which criminal in the right mind would accept a always changing body into their group.
One thing that I didn’t get was when Bob made a call to Donna in the beginning of the movie, why was Donna able to be identified, but not Bob? You’ll understand later when I explain why that was weird.
Bob has these 2 friends who loiter in his house. How he got ahold of these friends, I’m not too sure as there were many parts of the story that wasn’t explained, such as the fact of what happened to Bob’s wife and 2 daughters.
Bob’s manager was also another guy in an everchanging suit. Midway through the movie, I guessed she was Donna, even though her code name said Hank and I was later proven right when Hank got out of her suit and Donna appeared. Speaking of which, Donna is so cute! It turns out she was played by Winona Ryder. Apparently not even Donna’s her real name, as we find out later, another associate calls her Audrey.
At first, I thought the movie was about the government controlling what the people think, especially when Bob has a video recorded of him having sex with a random girl, but the face changes from the girl to Donna and back to the girl. One might say he was initially tripping, but even the video recordings show that. Maybe the recordings are of his own memory and not physical recorders?
At the end of the movie, Bob is overdosed with Substance D and Donna drops Bob at a treatment center. After several months of stabilization and his mind fried, he gets sent to a farm. Initially it looks like a corn field, but beneath the corn are the blue flowers, flowers who can be turned into Substance D. Audrey and her associate are talking over a cup of coffee. Apparently the pharmaceutical companies are only sending people with fried minds to work at these farms so they have no idea what is going on. Audrey blames herself for getting Bob involved into this, but it was something that needed to be done. However, Bob doesn’t even know about this, and they’re hoping something would snap when he encounters the blue flowers.
Did I mention Winona Ryder is so cute?
Here’s some production screen captures from Yahoo.
According to New York Times’ ‘A Scanner Darkly’: Keanu Reeves, Undercover and Flying High on a Paranoid Head Trip (from CDMCC), Philip K. Dick (author of “A Scanner Darkly”) was ingesting a whopping 1,000 hits of speed a week, along with plentiful daily doses of tranquilizers. “The happiness pills,” he admitted around that time, “are turning out to be nightmare pills.”
That’s about 6 hits of speed / hour! (calculation done by FuzzyWuzzy). Can a human survive that?
//krunk (^_^x)