A Scanner Darkly

Richard Linklaters "A Scanner Darkly", is one of the coolest films I have seen this year. It is based on a Phillip K. Dick novel by the same name. The film is expressionistic in nature, and we see a lot of crazy images and colours representing different aspects of the affected and unaffected human mind. The premise of the film is the struggle of law enforcement agent Bob Arctor to complete his assignment, but remain undercover as a drug abuser, and also Neurological and Psychological damage, and confusion.

This is realised through something called substance D, a highly potent drug that has poisoned the society in the film. We see the expressionist feel realised and extended through the animations of the effects of substance D -changing reality, the world moving faster or slower than possible around Arctor and bugs that aren't really there to name a few. The animations not only look fantastic but also makes viewers feel as if they too were suffering from the effects of drugs.

The film looks as cool as it does because the movie was digitally filmed in live action as standard, and then later in post-production the footage was cel shaded and animated with an interpolated rotoscope (basically animators traced over the movement in each frame of footage and shaded the images with a limited number of shades to give them a flat, animated look). The ‘Scramble Suits’ used by the law enforcement agencies in the film are really cool, and it was really hard to look at them without having a single aspect of identity to focus on with each feature of the face and body of the wearer changing constantly.

I found the film captivating in its entirety, and it was great to be able to relate the drug problems in the movie to the drug problems in the real world, because it is a serious problem, and the consequences are the same as those shown in the film.

It was a nice touch at the end of the film to have the list of people known by the cast and crew of the film who had been killed or affected by drugs because it showed how real the themes in the movie are.