As an ardent (perhaps militant) Philip K. Dick fan, I can’t decide whether or not the new movie adaptation of A Scanner Darkly by Richard Linklater is marketed directly towards me or towards the general public looking for a stylish sci-fi head-trip. But then, that sort of self-questioning and doubt is part and parcel of PKD at his finest.

I was, honestly, a little embarrassed to be part of the demographic in either case. The previews and advertisements that preceded the movie seriously turned me off. From the pathetic attempts to use kung fu movies to market McDonald’s trash to college age white men to the previews for the abominable looking Clerks II, by the time the actual feature presentation started, I was already in a bad mood.

I will admit to having gone into the movie with a heavy skeptic. A Scanner Darkly is one of my favorite PKD novels, and also what I would consider one of his most personal and emotional works. It would be hard for me to be satisfied with anything but the best rendition of this book to the screen. I had similar reservations about Waking Life as well. I thought the weird shaky animation style of tracing over people was going to get on my nerves and I thought the philosophical stuff was going to just come off as wanking. In that movie it somehow worked though, and the part where Richard Linklater gives a speech about Philip K. Dick in that movie made me believe that he really and truly understood what Philip K. Dick was all about.

The Scanner Darkly movie, however, completely unraveled that for me. To be totally and brutally honest, it was the kind of movie that I was ready to walk out of after five minutes. It just rubbed me in all the wrong ways and it was honestly a little bit torturous to sit through the whole thing.

I know it’s like Linklater’s “thing” to use all this animation stuff, but I just don’t get what the point of it is. If you took some still frames from the movie and showed them to me, I would be like, “Hey, those are sweet drawings!” Because they are. The illustrators who worked on it did some beautiful art. But the way it all ties together just seems sort of - I don’t know, lame. More than that though, it’s distracting. I kept getting hung up on the visual surface of the movie, which prevented me from entering into it emotionally.

Which is my second main gripe - that the movie lacked emotion. The book is basically a depiction of a phase in Dick’s life in between two of his failed marriages. And the book for me follows the further unraveling of this man, Bob Arctor’s life as he gets heavier and heavier into drugs. Which of course, he got into perhaps as a means of liberation from the woes of his original life. And the book uses an intricate sci-fi plot device of this man’s mind literally splitting in two and fighting against himself and becoming more distant from himsefl as he proceeds further and further down the spiral.

So the story is almost entirely internal. There is no real outward “action” in the book, nothing to hang a classic Hollywood action movie on. But Linklater didn’t go that way. He tried to stay true to the letter of the book, and perhaps failed to capture what I see as the real spirit of the book. Maybe it’s just been his type-casting, but Keanu Reeves for me is an actor who lacks any interior. I can’t, for the life of me, imagine him or his characters having any kind of meaningful interesting internal monologue - which sabotages the movie for me from the start. And I am soooo tired of him delivering the same drawn out husky line in every movie with just the words changed depending on the story:

“You mean… I can dodge bullets?”

“You mean, the hemispheres of my brain… are competing?”

I thought Robert Downey, Jr. was pretty much a dead ringer for how I’d imagine Barris to be; he did a great job - far superior to Keanu’s. Winona Ryder, I thought, was also expertly cast in the role of Donna, the “little black haired girl” who comes up so frequently in PKD’s many novels. However, the chemistry between her and Fred seemed totally weird. One of the things I love about Dick is this ability he has to capture a very specific frustration and complexity between male and female characters. It’s a love that is sort of non-sexual and almost spiritual at times, while also bordering on weird and psychotic at others. For me, that very important under-current of the book was totally lost on screen.

Also left unaccounted for are some of the stranger experiences of the plotline. In the novel, it sort of makes some kind of sick sense that Arctor/Fred sees the girl (Connie, I think) morph into Donna on the scanners. But in the movie, you’re just sort of left scratching your head over it. Same thing goes with his spiral down into split hemisphere-land. In the book, many small moments build up into the strange realization that the viewpoint character has become two characters somehow. In the movie though, that transition is confusing and haphazard and if you didn’t already know the book, I’d imagine it would be hard to understand what was even going on.

One of the things that was done pretty well though was the stoner dialogue they all share. For anybody who’s ever stayed up late smoking pot and drinking beer, those conversations have a ring of authenticity about them.

My final judgement on this movie is - sadly - that it’s not worth seeing. If you’re a die-hard Philip K. Dick fan, I think you’ll be disappointed. If you’re unfamiliar with his work, I think you’ll still find this movie boring and confusing. I would say wait for it to come out on Netflix, and maybe fire up the bong before you watch it and you’ll have a better time with it than I did.