A Scanner, Darkly

            This movie is really a masterwork. It features a bizarre style of rotoscoped animation over live footage, and features a host of bizarre and interesting characters and phenomena in the exporation of a distopian world filled and fueled by powerplays of control, and a desperate longing for knowledge and freedom. It’s a very huxleyan worldview that we step into as we meet a small band of drug addicts and losers, headed up by our leading man and hero Bob Arctur (Keanu Reeves, The Matrix). He leads his pals played by Robert Downey Jr. (Iron Man) and Woody Harrelson (Semi-Pro) in the events of miscreants while entertaining their paranoid delusions of government control and totalitarian rulers.

            They are all hooked on Substance D, a new lethal drug that separates the hemispheres of the brain, leading to severe mental damage. Arctor remarks candidly that D is destruction and despair, and ultimately death. Arctor is a real addict, but he’s also an undercover cop, making use of a special technology which conceals his identity even from his superiors to avoid corruption.

            As he experiences the full effects of D, it is clear he is no longer doing his job, but why is he there? And what must he do to redeem himself? Many people attempt to help him, but the twisted network of individuals and bizarre adventures of their lives draw Bob to a place he never imagined possible, while haunted by his former life.

            Will Bob discover the secret of substance D? or will the government continue to escalate it’s control of the individual through intense surveillance and coersion? These draw fascinating parallels with our government in the post Liberty Act era, and make startling assertions about the lengths government will go to in twisting its principles to maintain them.

            It also really qualifies this movie as a drug film, although it is about a fictitious drug, it is very much like the great drug movies of our time in it’s exploratory nature of the world as seen by the addict, and the shift in thinking from a normal person. A definite 2.