By Ryan Parsons | Image property of Warner Independant
A Scanner Darkly
Hey all you fans of Phillip K. Dick, Warner Independent films has recently begun to screen the upcoming animation A Scanner Darkly starring Keanu Reeves to some of the fortunate and the reviews have begun to pop up again.
What do they say? Well, two of the three are extremely positive while the one is extremely negative; go figure.
Scanner Darkly Reviews
The good people over at AICN
have again received the first few reviews to come from the early screening of A Scanner Darkly. According to the reviews, A Scanner Darkly is still 'incomplete', even though the film looks finished.
In this tale of addiction and conspiracy set in a not-too-distant-future Orange County, Keanu Reeves lives with Woody Harrelson and Robert Downey, Jr. His girlfriend is Winona Ryder. They have a drug-fiend friend, Rory Cochrane, who starts off the film covered in bugs.
Everyone in the film is on drugs and/or incredibly paranoid. There is a new designer drug in the world that is 100% addictive. Keanu works for a drug enforcement agency, as do others, to spy on his friends. He wears a chameleon coat of always changing faces and bodies to avoid suspicion in a world where everyone is suspicious of everything.
Thus we begin to roll down the mudslide of extreme paranoia into sweat-inducing, pulse-pounding absurdity.
But that's a great thing.
This film is beautiful in the same way that Sin City was beautiful. Hell, it even deals with some of the same issues of corruption. The animation is just skewed enough to keep you off-balance as a viewer, and so realistic at times you don't even know what you're watching anymore.
The acting is superb in this film.
I loved reading the Phillip K. Dick novel and only found one thing disappointing in all the book-- it tears the shit out of Brea, a city located in Orange County. It makes the small (in comparison) city seem like it is the sole beacon of drug addicts and low-income housing. I guess the future turned out a bit differently though, as Brea is now targeted to high-income folks. And guess what? I live in Brea! So what's up now?
Check out all the reviews for A Scanner Darkly at AICN.
The Scanner Darkly had its recent release date, September 16th,
pushed back to some time in March, 2006.
A Scanner Darkly
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