Lucybespro It is a performances centric movie

Lumsdal Good , But It Is Overrated By Some

Borserie it is finally so absorbing because it plays like a lyrical road odyssey that’s also a detective story.

Gurlyndrobb While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

WubsTheFadger Short and Simple Review by WubsTheFadgerFirst off, the films plot is, at times, very hard to follow because of the disorienting visuals. But all in all, the story is clever and the ending is hopeful. I found that that the theme of sacrificing one to save many is shown throughout the film. The story has a good plot twist and an ambiguous ending that left me thinking.The acting is very good. Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Rory Cochrane, Winona Ryder, and Woody Harrelson all perform very well.The pacing is a little slow and the runtime is overlong.I did not enjoy the animation style visuals. In Waking Life, I did enjoy them because they were smoother.Pros: Clever story, a good ending, and good actingCons: Slow pacing, an overlong runtime, and disorienting visualsOverall Rating: 7.0P.S. Richard Linklater is one of my favorite directors of all time. The Before Series and Waking Life are amazing movies that I would highly recommend. Boyhood is the next film I am going to watch that he directed.

Breumaster When i first saw "A scanner darkly" i was hypnotized ... for the first 15 minutes! Then, whenever i saw the changing face i could Smash my TV! The optic drives me crazy and i don't like that changing. That's awfully and no special enjoyment to me. I hope, that i never have to watch this movie again. I surely can't understand, how someone could give this movie more than 5/10 but there's a few People with better nerves out there for sure. I've seen Posters from "Waltz with Bashir", which is the same photoshoped animation look. First i wanted to see it, but now i avoid watching it, cause i fear, the makers could have made something similar to this movie. That maybe unfair, but i don't want to waste time and Money. Not a good movie for advertising this Animation-style!

cleary-joshua There were a lot of things I was prepared to say about "A Scanner Darkly" before I saw it. I was ready to say how it augments even more the fantastic canon of films that Richard Linklater has built up; how it goes along with "Blade Runner" and "Minority Report" as a great Philip K. Dick adaptation; how it's finally a Robert Downey, Jr. film that I enjoyed (apart from the brilliant "Good Night, and Good Luck"). Unfortunately, it is none of these three things. While there are a lot of good things about "A Scanner Darkly", I was a bit disappointed having seen so many great Linklater films recently.The film is about a drug called "Substance D", and Keanu Reeves' character's attempt to shut down a drug ring. The film shows the effects of drug addiction, while also providing an interesting thriller with a lot of twists and turns. However the number of these twists is possibly too many, and you finish the film with a lot of confusion and unanswered questions. The performances are mostly great, and Woody Harrelson plays a crazy drug addict really well. Downey Jr. is, unfortunately, pretty unbearable throughout.The film is made using animation onto live-action footage, the same technique used in the excellent "Waking Life". Instead of giving a dream-like sense, he uses it here to make a film which gives the audience the same experience as the drug-taking protagonists. The animation also allows much of Dick's vision to come through, preventing the use of unconvincing CGI with things like the ingenious "scramble suit". Linklater has a very promising vision for the film, and his standard, dialogue-heavy style does work pretty well throughout – it frequently seems like he is the right person to be making the movie. One thing that is instantly noticeable about the script is its wit, and a lot of it, while crazy and slightly bleak, manages to be humorous as well.Without comparing "A Scanner Darkly" to any of Linklater's previous work, I would say that it is a good film, but unfortunately one cannot help but feel slightly let down after such a great catalogue previously. It's interesting, but not essential.

globalalmanac Adapter/director Richard Linklater achieved at least three remarkable things with A Scanner Darkly: he created the most faithful movie adaptation of a Philip K. Dick novel or short story ever; he created an outstanding science-fiction film; and he maximized the limited acting ability of Keanu Reeves by casting Reeves as a burnt-out case in the midst of a drug-fuelled mental breakdown.Reeves plays Bob Arctor, a near-future California undercover government narc charged by his superiors with helping win the war against Substance D, a highly addictive illegal substance that rapidly causes irreversible brain damage in those addicted to it, partially by severing the connection between an addict's left and right brain hemispheres.Arctor is deep undercover, sharing a house with two other addicts and buying Substance D from a third in increasingly difficult-to-supply mass quantities in the hopes of moving up the supply chain. The government knows what the main ingredient of Substance D derives from -- a small, blue-flowered plant -- but it doesn't know who is growing it, refining it, and putting it on the street.Dick based much of A Scanner Darkly on his own drug experiences of the 1960's and 1970's, experiences which saw him committed to a mental asylum for a time, and experiences which caused him to interact with a large number of doomed and mostly doomed addicts. Indeed, the movie appends a portion of the novel's afterword to the end of the movie -- a roll call of the dead and damaged.The hyper-colourful, rotoscoped animation Linklater uses here (he first used it in Waking Life) suits the material and the tone of that material -- the movie looks like a fever dream, a pulsating nightmare in which nothing is stable. All the principals deliver outstanding performances, including Reeves, and perhaps most notably Robert Downey Jr., who presents us with a jittery speed freak (Substance D appears to be at least partially an amphetamine) over-bursting with his own paranoid delusions and fantasies.The title is a play on the Biblical phrase 'Through a glass, darkly': there are scanners in this movie, but they aren't the Cronenberg variety.