A Scanner Darkly

February 16th, 2007

So, I “read” the book about a 9 months ago. It was on CD actually, and I listened to it on a drive home. The book was excellent. Awesome character development and it made me very sad what happened to some characters, and vindicated for others.

Netflix sent the movie to me a week or two ago and I watched it then and I’m split on it I guess.  The rotoscoping made the movie slightly surreal which was a great feeling from the style of the book. It made everything seem reel but off.  Very nice effect.  The movie should have been longer in my opinion. They had to gloss over some of it and combine other parts in strange ways that really didn’t capture the disorientation of sections of the book.

The absence of internal dialog was also missing. But that is true of many Stephen King movie adaptations. It’s hard to put people talking to themselves in a movie and make it flow well.  It just lost a lot of the writing appeal without it for me.

All in all, I’d give it an A-.  Something you should read first and watch later to put some people with the names.  By the way, the casting was pretty much spot on. Yay.

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