"What Does A Scanner See?"

The way I see it, a movie can generate any emotion at all so long as it generates something. It's even better if it manages to generate more than one. But the hardest emotion to pull off is depression. I don't mean that it's hard to depress an audience. I've been depressed by lots of movies. What I mean is that it's hard to depress an audience and still have them enjoy your movie. Just about the only way to pull that one off is by also making the audience think, so you're depressed but it got you thinking about something, so that's okay. A Scanner Darkly, which might have pretensions of making its audience think, never really does and so just leaves you feeling depressed and a little bewildered.

It's set seven years in the future when 20% of the population is addicted to a drug known as Substance-D. Keanu Reeves plays a police officer who is assigned the case of suspected drug dealer Robert Arctor. The only problem is Reeves is actually Arctor. He is able to lead this double life because all undercover officers wear a high-tech suit while on the job that prevents anyone from discovering their true identity. However not only don't his superiors know his identity, Arctor, whose brain has been so affected by D, doesn't realize who he is either. The drug has turned him into a schizophrenic.

Most of the movie has no actual plot. We simply get to watch three paranoid druggies sit around growing more paranoid by the second and expounding upon wild theories. Some of it is slightly amusing and Robert Downey Jr. does a great job in his role, as does Harrellson. Although to be fair, I don't think playing someone on drugs is much of a stretch for either of them.

The oddest thing about this movie is the way that it has been animated. Apparently the actors were filmed as normal and then digitally painted over to transform them into animation. And the big question is, WHAT THE FUCK FOR? What is the point of this other than to say, "Hey look what I did! I painted pictures!" I found it to be totally annoying and pointless. It's like something a bored teen-ager might do on a free weekend with a movie and Photo Shop.

Near the end the plot finally kicks in, but even then the logic of it all is suspect, mainly because we've seen most of the movie through the eyes of Arctor whose grasp of reality is negligible. The two twist endings it tacks on in the last minutes are predictable and pointless since for the twist to work you'd have to care about someone, anyone, in this movie.

It seems that the point of this movie is to say, drugs are bad. Why then does the movie that's making this point appear to have been made by people on them?

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