The Fog of Drug War

A Scanner Darkly (5/5 stars)

Adapted from the novel by science fiction legend Phillip K. Dick and set seven years into the future, A Scanner Darkly tells the story of Bob Arctor (voiced by Keanu Reeves), an undercover agent working to combat the epidemic of a new drug known as Substance D, which is sweeping the country and causing mass havoc and paranoia among the population. As a result, a police state of sorts has been instituted; there is mass surveillance of the population at large, secret police instituted to infiltrate the drug rings (so secret infact, that at their office they wear "scramble suits" which continuously morph their appearance so that they are not even recognizable to their own coworkers), and an omnious organization known as New Path has been created to deal with rehabilitating the increasing number of addicts.

Like Linklater's previous (and far inferior) movie Waking Life, this movie uses a special animation technique where actors are filmed and then painted over in order to create the animation. It was a very good choice to do the movie this way, we simultaneously get very realistic characters but certain aspects of the film (like the scramble suits and some of the hallucinations) would probably be virtually impossible to do in a live-action film.

The movie opens with the experience of one particular addict at the very worst; he is halluciting that he is being swarmed by gigantic insects, and it is driving him completely insane. Through this character, who is an acquaitance to the more important ones, we are introduced to Arctor in his uncover form, a burnt out addict who hangs out with fellow users Barris (voiced by Robert Downey Jr.), Luckman (Woody Harrelson), and distant girlfriend and dealer Donna (Winona Ryder).

The movie first goes through a series of comic sequences essentially showing these characters high, simultaneously providing comic relief and showing the debilitating impact the drug has on those who use it. Eventually the movie takes a darker and more existential turn, because since he is taking the drug himself as part of his undercover operation, Arctor's world and sense of reality begins to completely unravel. Eventually we learn that he is infact actually the target of his own investigation. Because nobody at the police really knows who anyone is due to the scramble suits, no one is aware that he is actually investigating himself.

But is he investigating himself really? The damage the drug has done to him has caused his brain to attempt to compensate, and the results are severely surreal hallucinations. He's not even sure who he himself is, he's not sure who his friends are, he's not sure who his boss is, everything is a mass of confusion. Throughout the whole story, since the plot device is that Arctor is investigating himself as well as his friends, we do not even know who or what is really behind the madness of the drug or what anyone's motives even are. The mind-bending twistedness of the story keeps you constantly confused, just like Arctor, you're never sure if what you're watching is real or what it really means. Eventually, there are some shocking revelations and the secrets are revealed, but nobody really comes out of it cleanly.

But this isn't just the out-there fantasy trip movie that it seems, it's also a commentary on the damaging effects that drugs can have on a person; at one point we learn that Arctor was once was a normal middle class guy with a wife and two children, he has indeed sunk very deep into darkness. Not only that, even though the movie itself is somewhat of cautionary statement about using, it is also a statement about how the fight against the drug might be worse than the drug itself. Is it moral to put a society under complete surveillance in order to combat a plague that they choose to partake in voluntarily? Is it ethical to take a person and wreck their life in order to use them to fight the war? In any case, this is a fantastic and absolutely must-see movie.