A Scanner Darkly 720p - (2006 Lang: English)

When someone on a trip starts to wig out, you take them someplace quiet and talk soothingly and assure them that everything's going to be OK. But as the tagline of this film makes clear, for these characters everything is most definitely NOT going to be OK.

For those who haven't read the book, it's important to know what you're getting into. PK Dick wrote this novel as a way of telling the story of how he and his friends in the early '70s damaged and destroyed themselves with drugs. He tells this story within the framework of a surreal science fiction thriller, but many of the scenes are straight from his own experiences with the unpleasant consequences of people using drugs and disintegrating mentally.

This film does an amazing job of capturing the feel and tone of the book as well as the paranoia, perceptual distortions, and chaos of hallucinogenic overindulgence. Add to that a story that only gradually emerges from the madness, but by the end brings in a lot of heavy ideas such as the existence of free will, whether ends justify means, etc. There is a sense of consequence to what happens in the film, a sense of despair at what has been lost. So this story of drug-addled losers becomes the story of the human struggle for identity and meaning.

I have a couple of minor quibbles regarding scenes from the book that only partially made the cut (no explanation for the significance of "If I'd known it was harmless I would have killed it myself, no little kid to explain how 6 and 3 gears means 18 speeds). Still, most adaptations of PK Dick stories take a few basic ideas and try to shape them into more conventional films that fit into established genres. Even when it works, such as with Blade Runner or Total Recall, it's not really PK Dick. Not so this film. This is PK in all his dark and perverse and deeply thoughtful glory.

A Scanner Darkly is a 2006 American animated science-fiction thriller film directed by Richard Linklater, based on the novel of the same name by Philip K. Dick. The film tells the story of identity and deception in a near-future dystopia constantly under intrusive high-tech police surveillance in the midst of a drug addiction epidemic. The film was shot digitally and then animated using interpolated rotoscope, an animation technique in which animators trace over the original footage frame by frame, for use in live-action and animated films, giving the finished result a distinctive animated look. It was distributed by Warner Independent Pictures.

The film was written and directed by Richard Linklater and stars Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey, Jr., Woody Harrelson, and Winona Ryder. Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney are among the executive producers. A Scanner Darkly had a limited release in July 2006, and then a wider release later that month. The film was screened at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival and the 2006 Seattle International Film Festival, and nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form in 2007.

The United States has lost the war on drugs. Substance D, a powerful and dangerous drug that causes bizarre hallucinations, has swept the country. Approximately 20% of the total population is addicted. In response, the government has developed an invasive, high-tech surveillance system and a network of undercover officers and informants.

Bob Arctor is one of these undercover agents, assigned to immerse himself in the drug's underworld and infiltrate the supply chain. Sometime in the past, Arctor was abandoned by his wife and two children, leaving him alone in a now-rundown suburban house in Anaheim, California; the house has since been repopulated by Arctor's two drug-addicted, layabout housemates: Luckman and Barris. The three spend their days intoxicated and having long, paranoiac conversations. At the police station, Arctor maintains privacy by wearing a "scramble suit" that constantly changes every aspect of his appearance and he is known only by the code name "Fred." Arctor's senior officer, "Hank", and all other undercover officers, also wear scramble suits, protecting their identities even from each other.

Since going undercover, Arctor himself has become addicted to Substance D and he has befriended the main woman he has been spying on: a cocaine addict and Substance D supplier named Donna. Arctor hopes to purchase large enough quantities of Substance D from Donna that she is forced to introduce him to her own supplier, but he has also developed seemingly unrequited romantic feelings towards her.

At work, Hank orders Arctor to step up surveillance on Arctor himself and his associates; however, Arctor's house is now at the center of his own investigation, since this is where Donna and the other addicts in her and Arctor's life now spend most of their time. Arctor, therefore, has to even more carefully plan his double life, though his prolonged use of Substance D is damaging his brain, causing him to sometimes forget his own identity. Meanwhile, the justified paranoia of Arctor's housemates reaches extreme levels, and Barris secretly communicates to the police his exaggerated belief that Donna and Arctor are terrorists; Barris unknowingly conveys this information in the presence of Arctor himself, whose identity at the time is hidden behind his scramble suit.

After Barris supplies the police with a faked recording allegedly proving his claims about Donna and Arctor, Hank orders that Barris be held on charges of providing false information. After Barris's arrest, Hank reveals to Arctor that he has deduced him to be the true identity of "Fred" by a process of elimination. Arctor seems legitimately surprised and repeats his own name in a disoriented, unfamiliar tone. Hank informs him that the real purpose of the surveillance was to catch Barris, not Arctor, and that the police were deliberately increasing Barris's paranoia until he attempted to cover his tracks. Hank reprimands Arctor for becoming addicted to Substance D, and warns him that he will be disciplined, likely with just a fine but possibly a few months of penal labor. Hank "phones" Donna, asks her to take Arctor to New-Path, a corporation that runs a series of rehabilitation clinics, and Arctor, who is rapidly becoming more disoriented, leaves Hank's office, cursing Hank aloud. Afterwards, Hank enters the locker room and removes his scramble suit, revealing his true identity to the audience: Donna. At the New-Path clinic, Arctor experiences the symptoms of Substance D withdrawal, including more severe brain damage. He mindlessly repeats what others tell him and utters mostly simplistic responses.

Some time later, Donna (revealed to be another false name) converses with a fellow police officer, Mike, and the audience learns that New-Path is responsible for the manufacture and distribution of Substance D; ironically they use victims of the drug to tend their crops, since (being nearly mindless) they can be trusted not to reveal New-Path's secret. Donna expresses her growing ethical aversion to their police work, in which they deliberately selected Arctor—without his knowledge—to become addicted to Substance D all along; his health was sacrificed so that he might eventually enter a New-Path rehabilitation center unnoticed as a genuine addict and collect incriminating evidence of New-Path's Substance D farms. Donna and Mike debate whether Arctor's mind will recover enough so that he grasps the situation and returns from serving his sentence with substantial evidence to shut down New-Path.

In the final scene, New-Path gives Arctor a new name "Bruce" and sends him from the clinic to a labor camp at an isolated New-Path farm, where he spots rows of blue flowers hidden between rows of corn. These flowers, referenced throughout the film, are the source of Substance D. As the film ends, Arctor hides a blue flower in his boot, apparently prepared to hand it over to the authorities during his upcoming Thanksgiving respite, though it is not at all clear whether he has recovered enough of his mental faculties to do so.

Hollywood has tried so many times to capture the feel of Philip K. Dick terms of his style and writing. Films like Total Recall, Paycheck, Minority Report, all were playing to the lowest common denominator and really lost a lot of the feel that Dick conveys in his writing. Blade Runner came close, but it still missed the essential darkness that Dick brings to each and every one of his works.

Enter "A Scanner Darkly", aside from the Interpolative Rotoscoping that the film maker used to put the graphical images of this movie together and give it an amazing visual feel all its own, the vision and imagery conveyed by the film are as true to Dick's original as any movie has come. I left the theater feeling overwhelmed, touched, and changed, much the same way as when I'd finished the book. This is rare, and it is decidedly a beautiful thing.