A Scanner Darkly

At times excruciating in how unimpressive the effort of the rotoscoping gets. Still frames of cars slide down an equally unmoving background. It feels like they’re really stretching any artistic formality with simply just getting a serviceable image out there. Then sometimes it feels like the only way you could have possibly adapted a Phillip K. Dick novel. Moments that are trying to link hard to imagine sci-fi wonders to the drug addled psychotic perspective of a character that was shot in a real room in 2004. All of it melts into this uniform graphic novel alloy that makes the more fantastical items more rooted into the reality while the banal and unassuming things seem false and perhaps terrifying. Keanu Reeves is an empty bag in an empty bag. Sometimes this works to an incredible effect when the other actors in the room have something to fill it with, sometimes it simply doesn’t. Actors faces fight their animated interpretations and create whirlwind moments of confusion and paranoia where you have to decrypt what they feel as they also are sent on a runaround of information and distrust. The writing is what really leaps out and holds it all together. People out of place and out of luck desperately hold onto each other with fingers made of needles. They throw themselves out of the door and become a mask and they have forgotten if that was for some greater good or selfish gain. They’re all deeply in pain. Sometimes a movie is made in an incredibly messy way. An at once thought to be unimpeachable method for telling a story quickly loses its head in the action. What results is something that may not be exactly perfect craftsmanship but can shine through to some and receive praise. Most of the times these movies do not quite click and we’re left walking away disappointed. Sometimes you watch them and then you cry.