Robert Downey Jr.

A Scanner Darkly (Philip K. Dick, 1977/Richard Linklater, 2006)

a film reel

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.

Review: Oppenheimer (2023)

radiation protection goggles

Early in the film “Oppenheimer,” J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) rides a horse into a wild area of New Mexico. In a moment of foreshadowing, he describes the quirky weather of the Los Alamos region. This introduction also demonstrates that Oppenheimer was comfortable with horses and the wilderness.

Somehow, I think of a physicist as from an urban background; they are natives to a university in the city. Oppenheimer puts that bias to rest. First, he finds the wilderness a place of refuge, and his academic institute was filled with nature; it’s not concrete nor steel and glass towers.

The film Oppenheimer travels between different threads of his biography as a collection of episodes. The time he spent at Los Alamos and his interaction with left wing activists are intertwined with his personal relationships, as well as a conflict with Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.). The threads are woven together to reach a comfortably cinematic conclusion.

The film amplifies the emotional intensity by using sound as a powerful force for the audience to experience. Discussions of nuclear physics are paired with abstract displays of particles and a deep, pulsing roar. The powerful displays helped retain interest by invoking the ultimate product of the nuclear physics research: the Trinity test and the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

When I felt that the emotions in the film were getting a little muddied, the story leaned on the conflict between Strauss and Oppenheimer. The film made their conflict become a central part of the biopic. It was easier for the director to expose their proxy battle as something meaningful and familiar to a modern audience. To accomplish that, the film overlapped Oppenheimer’s security clearance hearings with the cabinet nomination hearing of Strauss.

One episode discussed in Oppenheimer’s general biography is the issue of whether he poisoned an apple to spite a professor who had been unkind to him. The film covers the episode by taking a middle, unlikely path. The incident is built into a cinematic climax before being resolved harmlessly.

The Manhattan Project and the end of WW II were followed by Oppenheimer’s advocacy for nuclear disarmament agreements to prevent nuclear weapons from being used in the future. His efforts toward that were unsuccessful and once Oppenheimer’s security clearance was rescinded, he was unsuccessful.

I was able to see Oppenheimer in an IMAX theater which was welcome. It made the open landscapes of Los Alamos seem more encompassing and the sound more visceral.

I don’t feel like I know much more about Oppenheimer or Strauss as individuals because their characterizations are pretty one-dimensional. The story is important in that it describes a critical moment in history, but this presentation of that story is not very satisfying.