Hola all. Massawyrm here.
You know, I've been pretty brutalized over the years by my local buddies for just not liking Waking Life. And what can I say? I didn't like it. I thought it was inventive as all hell, a pleasure to look at and a solid piece of art. But philosophy is a tricky thing.
Injecting strong philosophical exposition into a film is extremely tough. You either lose the bulk of your audience when going far over their heads by requiring a philosophical background to understand the piece, or you simply bore the students of philosophy by catching the audience up to speed by providing a retread of Philosophy 101. For me, Waking Life was the latter - a film I'm certain those who haven't spent years with their nose in philosophy texts found enlightening, but me, having squandered my prime college philandering years doing so, found dull as dirt.
One of the key problems with this is that Philosophy is currently in something of a dead zone. The last great revolution, existentialism, has long since passed and been worked as far as the equation will allow. All of its forefathers have passed and what we're left with is the minutia of defining terms and explaining subsets of subsets of philosophical thought. In fact, the only remotely exciting original thought and arguments in this day and age stem from science fiction, or more appropriately when used correctly, speculative fiction.
While Sci-fi certainly has its share of space battles, alien races and seemingly magical technological advancements, that's not why it is so wildly popular. Science fiction is the last bastion of freely dispersed, original philosophical thought. It is the great ethical 'what if' genre. Questions like 'What makes us human' pervades every bit of Asimov's and Bradbury's Artificial Intelligence literature.
William Gibson addressed the issues of intellectual property in a world where copying and transmitting something no longer required the resources we were accustomed to - a full decade before most people even knew what the internet was and two decades before it would become a huge legal battle with arguments of ethics on both sides. And when Heinlein put us at war with insectoid invaders, he didn't do it just because he thought it would be cool to read about guys in power suits fighting bugs - he did it because he was posing the values of properly run fascism, asking 'In the face of unthinking foreign invaders, would not Fascism be the best system to deal with it? And doesn't that make it the best system now?'
On the flip side of Heinlein was an anti-establishment speculative fiction writer by the name of Philip K. Dick - a man whose writing questioned the growing fascist ideals in this country (in the 60's and 70's) and posited in his literature the potential outcomes and ethical problems that were brewing because of it (both then and now.) Dick tied quite a bit of this in with his other passion - a complete distaste for the growing drug culture that he saw destroying many of his friends and contemporaries. One of his greatest works on these themes was a story titled 'A Scanner Darkly.' And this is exactly what Richard Linklater has attempted to bring to the screen with his second foray into intellectual animation.
This time, he absolutely succeeds. Everything Linklater grasped at with Waking Life, he accomplishes successfully here. Based upon a book that was published nearly three decades ago, the ideas are far from new, and yet Linklater injects new blood into it, perfectly positing Dick's question 'How long will it take of spying on ourselves before one man is actually, literally, required to spy on himself?' The answer to that question proves to be just as paranoid, darkly comical and just plain fucked up as its source material. This is true, speculative Sci-fi at it's best, a modern think piece meant to stimulate the juices in your brain to a fever pitch. It is a twisted bundle of nerves pulled out of the top of your spine and poked repeatedly by a sharp metal object. Imagine, if you will, an animated Requiem for a Dream and you begin to get a grasp for the frenetic, emotional, psychotic mood of Scanner Darkly.
Linklater's an interesting cat. He's one of those guys that simply refuses to abandon experimental, independent cinema while heeding the call for commercial success. I absolutely love a solid half of his films while really disliking the other half - and what's odd is that I don't specifically love either his independent work, or his studio work, as a whole. I love and detest certain films from both bodies of work equally. But despite the fact that Linklater is very hit or miss with me, I absolutely respect what he's doing as an artist. He has a unique vision, a definite philosophy to the way he makes films and what material he chooses.
With A Scanner Darkly, he makes an interesting artistic choice that many are going to question over and over again. In a thousand reviews and in a thousand different voices, people are going to ask 'Why the hell is this animated?' Because it didn't need to be. So why was it animated? Because Linklater said so. It was his artistic choice, the pallet he chose to paint with. And personally, I love the choice. Sure, he could have chosen any number of special effects tricks to pull off the stranger, more hallucinatory effects and scenes in the film - but he didn't. He wanted to make a cartoon for adults that had a look and feel that is entirely Linklater's.
And that's where people are going to get off the bus for this one. Because A Scanner Darkly isn't for everyone. It's not an action film. It's not a tense sci-fi on the run thriller. It's not the Matrix, V for Vendetta or Blade Runner. It's its own little beast. Set in a world a scant 7 years in the future, this isn't a gritty piece of cyberpunk - it is very much set in our own world with a few, wondrous technological advancements. People still drive shitty, beat up cars and live in run down, homogenized tract homes overrun with crabgrass. They just happen to be on a brand new, top of the line drug while they do it. And being a film about junkies, this all works very well indeed. The grit, the grime and the surreal imagery all play perfectly into the realm of this kind of fiction, and Linklater's animation accentuates that even further.
A Scanner Darkly is a talk piece, a think piece, not at all the type of film you'd expect to be mixed with summer fare. If the closest thing you've ever come to knowing Philip K. Dick is Blade Runner, then man, do you have a surprise coming. Dick's work was paranoid, frenetic, mind bending and more often than not, pretty fucked up. And that all shows up here. This is the single most faithful adaptation of Dick's work to date. I won't say best - I dig the hell out of this film, but it's no Blade Runner. But it's a damn fine film and really gets everything that we love about PKD across.
The casting, however, is gonna be a mixed bag for some folks. Keanu's solid here, in fact, pretty perfect for the role of a "Burnt out husk" of a man, but many already are having a hard time getting past his monologues being a bit too "Matrix-y." Likewise, Winona Ryder is great, but not given very much to do at all. Conversely, Robert Downey Jr. and Woody Harrelson absolutely steal the show. All obvious jokes aside, can you honestly think of two guys better for the roles of tweaking junkies than two guys who are publicly known to have run in those circles? Talk about guys who have tons of personal experience to draw from - they know firsthand the cadence and delivery of drug addled logic spilled out over a coffee table of mixed drugs. And man do they sell it. They're both equal parts hilarious and Oh God, don't leave me alone with this guy, he freaks me the fuck out. The infamous 18 Speed Bicycle scene alone (adapted perfectly from the book btw) is worth the price of admission alone.
All in all, A Scanner Darkly is a fantastic work of speculative fiction and exactly the type of film PKD fans have been clamoring for for ages. If the idea of a cerebral mind fuck of a drug film sounds like your cup of tea, this comes HIGHLY recommended. However, if watching the trailers has you amped up for something tense, fast paced and more akin to the actiony sci-fi films, this film ain't for you. It's slow, mostly comprised of conversations and might prove just a bit too kooky and quirky for you. This is an "Over Coffee" movie, the kind that you should plan to sit with some friends afterwards and discuss. Far from the easily digestible films playing in the theatres adjacent to it, this, if nothing else, will find a cult following that will praise it highly and keep it on their DVD shelves for years to come. Others just won't get what all the fuss was about.
Until next time friends, smoke 'em if ya got 'em. I know I will.
Massawyrm
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