A Scanner Darkly: Keanu Reeves’ Best Movie

(AUTHOR’S NOTE: This article could and should be considered a movie review. Two of my recent articles, one on the Pirates of the Caribbean and another on Miami Vice, were not intended to be movie reviews because they weren’t movie reviews; they weren’t movie reviews at all. So, for the brain-dead segment of my readership, I guess I should deliberately point out what is a movie review and what is just mindless commentary on pop culture. With that said, if you want to see Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly then you probably shouldn’t read this. Why would you purposely read about a movie that you want to see before you actually go see it? I will never understand this mindset.)

A Scanner Darkly, the darkly humorous, half-animated venture from schizophrenic director Richard Linklater, is one of, if not the best American film to slip under the box office and critical radars this year. A Scanner Darkly, based on Philip K. Dick’s 1977 novel, is a science fiction deluge into an imagined future. It is a story about drugs, control and humanity, and it is harrowing. This is not the first time that a Philip L. Dick book has made its way to big screen, his 1968 novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” was transformed into the Ridley Scott/Harrison Ford vehicle Blade Runner.

A Scanner Darkly employs the animation technique known as interpolated rotoscope, which was also used in Linklater’s Waking Life. In layman’s terms, this process involves the “digital painting” of real footage. I don’t know the details, but to put it in perspective, swallow this nugget: each minute of animation requires 500 hours of work.

The result is visually spectacular and in the case of Keanu Reeves: career-making. I’m not saying the animation tilt was the only thing to Reeves’ best performance to date, but it certainly helped. The Matrix star, who is often criticized for his monotone delivery and character repetition, is freshly complex in Scanner, the perfect blend of depth and aloofness.

Richard Linklater has had quite the disparate movie-making career. From his innovative debut Slackers to his cult party hit Dazed and Confused to mainstream hits (School of Rock) and misses (The Bad News Bears remake) to the crazy, plot less Waking Life; Linklater has always done his own thing. And A Scanner Darkly might just be the best thing he’s ever done.

I was going to get into some plot synopsis, but I’d rather not. Let me just leave you with this thought: If you’ve been on the fence about seeing A Scanner Darkly and it’s still playing near you, don’t hesitate, go see this movie. You won’t be disappointed.