"A Scanner Darkly" Review

Think "Minority Report" meets "Half Baked" meets "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" meets "Pee Wee's Playhouse." "A Scanner Darkly" is an animated (rotoscope) political drug movie where many times, the viewer can be uncertain of what they are or aren't seeing. To use some lovely lingo, it was "trippy." I can only imagine how crazy one would get if they watched the film while tripping. Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Winona Ryder, and Woody Harrleson are the four main stars in the film, based off a novel by Phillip Dick, where at times they look too real to be animated and vice versa.

I can't write too much about it, because one must actually see the film to understand it. Some may not even get it then. What I will say is that "A Scanner Darkly" is a funnier film than I had anticipated, is eerie in its own way, and brings another added element to the screen with it being in rotoscope. The fact that Phillip Dick wrote this 30 years ago is eerie in and of itself. The fact that some elements of the film can now be thought of as non-fictional is the truly crazy part.

Overall Grade: 7.5/10