A Scanner Darkly

A Scanner Darkly is cool because it doesn’t bite. It burrows. It’s cool because it not only gets out of the Hollywood rut of trying to make every adaptation of Philip K. Dick look just like Blade Runner, but it also takes the lame rotoscoping technique (filming the actors live, then animating over their movements) and makes it seem organic. It’s weird because once you get used to the oddball animation, director Richard Linklater (Fast Food Nation, Dazed and Confused) goes and decides to play games with it, as objects in the background surface briefly from the animation, then submerge again. Creepy in that as portrayed here, the world of seven years from now seems like a fairly inevitable progression from the current time.