I saw recently “A scanner darkly” and although it is not my favorite type, I managed to follow it from beginning to end. I must recognize that I was attracted by the fact that it was considered an animation, although it is not an animation in the true sense of the word. I liked very much the rotoscopic technique (maybe because it was the first feature film of this kind that I have seen so far)
The action of the film unfolds somewhere in the future and has in foreground an undercover cop whose life and career collapse when the contact with D drug is too intimate, becoming one of its many victims suffering from paranoia, hallucinations, ending rather predictably with brain damage, being affected very serious his cognitive functions.
The message of the film is visible from the beginning, namely that the drugs are dangerous because of the brain damage which appear in the case of the long-term consumption, that besides behavioral disorders that the subjects manifest. Every character has predominantly a certain disorder so that the visual show offered throughout the entire film to offer to the watcher a picture as complete as possible as regards the manifestation of drug addiction.
The film is not aggressive and that is the only fact that we can reproach, because the nowadays public accustomed to violent messages, could not give much attention to the moral of the film and some adolescent spectators who form its target, could even get bored by the end of the film.
Additionally, the scenes which take place more in the light of the day or in a well lit place are somewhat in contradiction with the movie theme, but, if we added the black humor, which spices certain scenes, we can overcome easily that deficiency. (The scene which I liked is the one in which an entity from another dimension reads to one of the characters the list of mistakes that he made during his life)
In all, the film “A scanner darkly” with two prizes won and six nominalizations, is a film that can be followed easily, leaving at the end a certain good mood, despite the message and the little funny theme.