Keanu Reeves stars as Bob Arctor, an undercover cop for the
Orange County Sheriff’s Department who’s trying to bust open a Substance D ring.
It’s seven years in our future, and undercover cops like Bob wear special
scrambler suits whenever he’s out in public, such as making a speech about the
war on drugs before a local commerce group, or working at the police station.
The scrambler suit, which is worn like a hazmat suit, projects a sort of a
crazy-quilt kaleidoscope of images of various people--which ironically resembles
the sort of bizarre hallucination seen by a druggie on a bad trip. Bob is one of
the grim soldiers in this latest drug war that’s battling the spread of
Substance D, the latest and most popular illegal narcotic that has enslaved
millions in its grip. Yet the effects of this never-ending war is wearing Bob
out.
Having gone undercover to get close to Donna Hawthorne (Winona Ryder), a known
seller of Substance D, Bob has become addicted to the drug himself. He finds
himself a part of a mixed-up collection of lovable oddballs which include Donna,
who doesn’t like to be touched; the overly-cerebral (and paranoid) James Barris
(Robert Downey Jr.); the hapless Ernie Luckman (Woody Harrelson), and Charles
Freck (Rory Cochrane), who is so off the wall he makes the others look
normal--the scene where he imagines he’s covered in bugs is guaranteed to creep
you out. Yet the best part happens when Bob gets called into police headquarters
by his handler, Hank. It seems the police got a tip on one member of the group
that Bob hangs out with: it’s him.
Not knowing who Bob really is, thanks to the scrambler suits they always wear in
their meetings, Hank orders Bob to step up the investigation on this Robert
Arctor fellow, whom the brass now believe to be the head honcho of this drug
ring. As if Bob’s life isn’t already trippy enough--what with the growing
hallucinations he’s suffering from taking Substance D--now he’s spying on
himself. If your idea of great SF is Star Trek and/or Star Wars (not that
there’s anything wrong with that), then you might be disappointed in A Scanner
Darkly. But if you love challenging, thoughtful SF that doesn’t take place in a
spaceship--in short, if you’re a fan of the late author Phillip K. Dick, whose
book this movie was based on, then you’ll probably love A Scanner Darkly.
Written and directed by Richard Linklater, A Scanner Darkly was shot with
"interpolated rotoscoping", which is basically a technique where animators come
in during post-production and draw over the live action footage, creating a
cartoon with very realistic motion. It’s a style that Ralph Banski made famous
on his films, such as Fire And Ice, and Linklater uses it to great effect here,
since the animation is very dreamy and a little trippy in its visual style,
giving the viewer the sense of being slightly high. The movie does a great job
in capturing the overt paranoia of the drug culture--as well as the
paranoia of the bureaucratic/corporate mentality which uses the drug war to
instigate intrusive surveillance on the average citizen. The film is
surprisingly balanced; actually serving as a dire warning against drug use, as
well as going too far in the fight to stem the tide of drugs. Filled with a
marvelous cast that works from an intelligent script, A Scanner Darkly proves to
be a story whose message is just as relevant now as when it was first written by
Dick back in the 1970s.
--SF
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