Richard Linklater writes and directs this American rotod
thriller based on the novel by Philip K. Dick. The war on drugs
has been lost, and when a reluctant undercover cop is ordered to
on those he is closest to, the toll that the mission takes on
his sanity is too great to comprehend. Bob Arctor (Keanu Reeves)
is a narcotics officer who is issued an order to on his
friends and report back to headquarters. In addition to being a
cop, though, Arctor is also an addict. His drug of choice is a
ubiquitous street drug called Substance D, a drug known to cause
bizarre hallucinations and produce split personalities in its
users. The cast also includes Robert Downey Jr, Woody Harrelson
and Winona Ryder.
From .co.uk
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How well you respond to Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly
depends on how much you know about the life and work of
celebrated science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. While it
qualifies as a faithful adaptation of Dick's semiautobiographical
1977 novel ( /gp/product/1857988477/ ) about the perils of drug
abuse, Big Brother-like surveillance and rampant paranoia in a
very near future ("seven years from now"), this is still very
much a Linklater film, and those two qualities don't always
connect effectively.
The creepy potency of Dick's premise remains: The drug war's been
lost, citizens are kept under rigid surveillance by holographic
scanning recorders, and a schizoid addict named Bob Arctor (Keanu
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 (played by Woody Harrelson, Winona
Ryder, Rory Cochrane, and Robert 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."
While it's virtually guaranteed to achieve some kind of cult
status, A Scanner Darkly lacks the paranoid intensity of Dick's
novel, and Linklater's established penchant for loose and loopy
dialogue doesn't always work here, with an emphasis on
drug-culture humor instead of the panicked anxiety that Dick's
novel conveys. As for the use of "interpolated rotoscoping"--the
technique used to apply shifting, highly stylized animation over
conventional live-action footage--it's purely a matter of
personal preference. The film's look is appropriate to Dick's
dark, cautionary story about the high price of addiction, but it
also robs performances of nuance and turns the seriousness of
Dick's story into... well, a cartoon. Opinions will differ, but A
Scanner Darkly is definitely worth a look--or two, if the
mind-rattling plot doesn't sink in the first time around. --Jeff
Shannon
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Synopsis
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Set in suburban Orange County, California, in a future where
America has lost the war on drugs, one reluctant undercover cop
(Reeves) is ordered to start ing on his friends. He is
launched on a paranoid journey into the absurd, where identities
and loyalties are impossible to decode.
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