In the promotional trailers for Constantine, I saw one for the movie A Scanner Darkly which was directed by Richard Linklater. It was animated and visually fascinating because it was made via rotoscoping. In other words, the artists who made the film started with regular footage and transformed it into animation by redrawing each frame. The style of the film was striking and its trailer made me want to see it. According to material on the DVD, each character had a detailed style sheet for their animated design. The transformation was a time-consuming process.

After watching the film, I wanted to read the book. I was surprised that, although I needed to get the film via Interlibrary Loan, the book was in my local library. Philip K. Dick wrote several other stories that became movies including Blade Runner and Minority Report. I’ve seen both of those and they also have striking ideas of strange futures. The film begins, “7 years from now”, putting it into the context of something that could happen at any time.

Keanu Reeves was the protagonist Fred/Robert Arctor and Robert Downey Jr. played the character James Barris. Woody Harrelson, Winona Ryder and Rory Cochrane also appeared as important characters in the film.

I liked Barris’s performance. He had a paranoid, muttering voice that recalled a drugged-out character who was trying to be impressive while not having much important to say. Fred was a police officer and simultaneously the friend of Barris, Robert Arctor.

The story centers around a powerful drug, Substance D. The police are trying to find the source of the synthetic. The drug is also known colloquially as death and wavering between life and death is a theme. As Fred, his police employers monitor its effects on him. The medical officers tell him that it is causing interference between the hemispheres of his brain. As the story progresses, he becomes more and more confused until he goes to a drug treatment facility that specializes in Substance D.

The book and movie follow each other pretty closely. Although the film presents the Los Angeles of the story as a surveillance state with the police monitoring public spaces, the novel has surveillance of a much smaller scale, of just several targeted houses.

One science fiction element in the story is the scramble suit. The officer wearing it continually changes their appearance to disguise who they are. The goal is to protect the identity of the officer when appearing for public presentations or with other officers. When Reeves’ character is with Barris and the others, he is not wearing the suit; at work, the full body suit makes him almost invisible.

In a sense, the book and film are weak because transition between the majority of the story and their conclusion is abrupt and the story could be summarized with just a couple of sentences, spoiling the events of the rest of the them before they reach their sudden resolution. It is a forward pointing story making you imagine what happens next.

I read the book after seeing the movie. I noticed that I didn’t visualize the characters in the book as the actors and I didn’t hear their voices as they spoke in the book. Perhaps the animation style of the story made the actors’ personal appearance less attached to the story.

The book and movie had a strong emotional ending. A coda follows with an author’s note memorializing friends of the author who had died or suffered severe consequences of drug use.