BEFORE: Wow, I'm really hitting the films boutique directors all of a sudden - Scorsese, Wes Anderson, Jim Jarmusch, and now Richard Linklater. It's like I tapped into a vein or something. OK, I'm going to run with it. I was a bit upset that I didn't get to see "Captain America: Brave New World", like I could have linked there from Giancarlo Esposito, but the film's not available for streaming at a regular price yet. And if I watch that film, I could link to "Thunderbolts" next Friday, which would have been great - maybe I'll watch "Thunderbolts" anyway and sit on the review for a couple months, and I think I see another way to link to "Brave New World", but I'll still have to figure out a way to get there. I'll keep it in mind as I try to link to Memorial Day.
In the meantime, Winona Ryder carries over from "Night on Earth" and here are the links that will get me to Mother's Day: Jason Douglas, Laura Dern, Burt Reynolds, Sally Field, Beau Bridges and Queen Latifah. Sally Field will be a contender for most appearances at the end of the year, if I have anything to say about it, and I do.
THE PLOT: An undercover cop in a not-too-distant future becomes involved with a dangerous new drug and begins to lose his own identity as a result.
AFTER: I know I passed on opportunities to watch this when it first came out, I had seen Linklater's previous rotoscoped film "A Waking Life" at a film festival and I wasn't crazy about the technique. I guess I was crusading against rotoscoping, because it's not really true animation if you just draw over film or video images, you could say it's a form of cheating. And these days you can probably get the same effect with a filter on your instagram, you wouldn't really call that "animation" if you just pushed a button and made live footage look like a cartoon, right? Well, that seems to be where we're headed, because in a very short time, thanks to A.I., we'll be able to cartoon-ize anything, and compared to traditional animation, it's going to look like hot garbage. But the studios will love it because the costs will be WAY down, and I'm guessing the public isn't going to care very much about how the sausage is made.
So now that I've seen the film, I can confirm that I was kind of right in the first place - it's nearly unwatchable, for a number of reasons. First off, it's incredibly hard to understand what's going on. I think the character played by Keanu Reeves, Bob Arctor, was a cop, but an undercover cop assigned to live with people and interact with people who are buying and dealing this drug, Substance D, but the problem is that he got high on his own supply, and the drug has damaged his brain. He's kind of leading a double life but since the two hemispheres of his brain are having trouble connecting with each other, he can't quite reconcile the situation he's in, I think the cop part of him is somehow spying on the drug-user part of him, but that doesn't really make sense, also shouldn't he then arrest himself? Also his roommate Barris goes to the police station to have Bob arrested, but the cop he talks to is also Bob, who is in disguise. This is where things get very confusing.
The undercover cops wear this sort of hoodie that disguises their identity, the people around them see an ever-changing array of facial parts and they hear a disguised voice, so nobody can identify the police, which honestly seems like a terrible idea. Like if Bob is undercover, shouldn't he wear the disguise hoodie when he's at the drug house, not when he's at the police station? How is the public supposed to trust the police when they can't even see what they look like? How is anybody supposed to get work done at the police station, you can't report in to your desk sergeant if you don't know which one is him, and he also can't identify you, so how does he even know who showed up for work on any given day? Worse, how can any cop be held accountable for their actions, if you can't even tell them apart.
The animation effect of constantly changing facial features and clothing is disconcerting, to say the least - it may also make you nauseous or give you seizures or something, I don't know. This goes against everything I know about animation, where you have to design a character that is immediately identifiable and distinctive, and then make sure you draw that character consistently throughout the whole movie so the audience doesn't get confused. So what are we to make of a few characters who look like everybody and everything at the same time, and all talk with (essentially) the same monotone disguised voice? This vocal effect works on "The Masked Singer", but not in a narrative animated film.
What they end up showing us of Bob, when he's in the "scramble suit", is an extreme close-up of his face, kind of like they do with Iron Man in the MCU movies, supposedly this helps sell the idea that Tony Stark is inside the Iron Man armor when they cut to the extreme facial close-up, but I just find it annoying, to me it's a reminder that Robert Downey Jr. did a lot of work in a studio somewhere and probably wasn't on set the day they filmed all the big action scenes. It's like phoning it in, and it's stupid, surely there must be a better way to remind us that Iron Man is in the suit - and remember, they even FOOLED us with this shot in "Iron Man 3", they were showing us close-ups of Tony Stark's face while Iron Man was doing stuff, and then after an Iron Man suit exploded, we found out he was controlling the armor remotely.
They fool us once here in "A Scanner Darkly", too, they show us two cops having a conversation, and they're both wearing "scramble suits", they cut to the close-up of Keanu Reeves' animated face, which implies that he's inside the scramble suit - then we find out it was someone else, and I don't like being fooled by the agreed-upon language of film. (Yeah, I'm still. mad about the parallel editing in "The Silence of the Lambs", too, you know what I'm talking about.).
A lot of the movie is also aimless and pointless, Rob goes out for a drive with his roommates, Barris and Luckman. They're all high on Substance D, I think - and there's some kind of problem with the car, the gas pedal came loose or something. Meanwhile they're having some pointless conversation about how Barris booby-trapped the house because he wants to injure whoever is planting surveillance equipment in the house. They pull over because of the car trouble, and nobody knows how to fix it, it's really just 10 minutes of your life that you'll never get back, the sequence has no merit or importance at all. I'm not sure the movie does, either.
Things don't end up going well for Rob, because he took the drug to blend in, but now he's become brain-damaged, like 80% of Americans who are also addicted to this drug in the future. I'd say that the film was ahead of its time, but there's no real resemblance to, say, the opioid crisis or the wave of fentanyl addiction. Rob has lost much of his cognitive function so he's taken to a New-Path rehabilitation center, and is given a farming job. He seems to be able to repeat the instructions he's given, but that doesn't mean he understands them. But he may still serve a purpose as an inside informant, because apparently the company that runs these rehab clinics is also responsible for growing and distributing Substance D, however in his brain-damaged condition, what are the chances that Rob can still be helpful to the investigation?
This is based on a 1977 novel from Philip K. Dick, the guy who wrote the story "Blade Runner" was based on and a lot of other sci-fi stories (hit films like "Total Recall" and "Minority Report", but also duds like "Impostor", "Paycheck" and "Next"). But this is kind of the same problem with the movie "Strange Days", even when "A Scanner Darkly" was made, the story was already 30 years old, so no matter what, we're looking at some past version of what somebody thought the future might be like, and if they didn't hit the nail right on the head, then what are we even looking at? An alternate present, or a future that will now never come to be?
Plus, the animation is extremely inconsistent. You would think with rotoscoping objects that were shot on film would create something very precise, but I noticed several times where an object didn't quite move correctly, like a car should move in a constant direction when compared to the background, it shouldn't shift all over the place like it got unstuck somehow. Or a character lying on his bed might look like he was floating above it and moving in an impossible way, because the actor might have been filmed separately, and thus he's similarly not synched up with the scene he's in, there's no way to register the actor and the background scene to move the same way, and there will always be slight movements, even with a camera locked in place. Normally I'd just say this was shoddy workmanship, but it clearly took a lot of effort and technology to make an animated feature that looks THIS crappy. So, congratulations?
I think by the time he made "Apollo 10 1/2" the process got a little better, that film's animation wasn't as jumpy and muddled-up as this, it was a lot smoother. Still I have to think that maybe the old ways of making animated films, like with peg bars and registration holes, were still more effective, at least back in 2006.
Directed by Richard Linklater (director of "Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood")
Also starring Keanu Reeves (last seen in "John Wick: Chapter 4"), Robert Downey Jr. (last seen in "Game 6"), Woody Harrelson (last seen in "Fly Me to the Moon"), Rory Cochrane (last seen in "Antlers"), Chamblee Ferguson (last seen in "The Newton Boys"), Angela Rawna (last seen in "Boyhood"), Marco Perella (ditto), Steven Chester Prince (ditto), Mitch Baker (last seen in "Fast Food Nation"), Hugo Perez (ditto), Lisa Marie Newmyer, Dameon Clarke (last seen in "I Love You Phillip Morris"), Jason Douglas (last seen in "Men, Women & Children"), Alex Jones (last seen in "Rigged: The Voter Suppression Playbook"), Leif Anders, Turk Pipkin (last seen in "The Alamo"), Natasha Janina Valdez, Eliza Stevens, Sarah Menchaca, Melody Chase, Rommel Sulit (last seen in "Mr. Brooks") with the voices of Sean Allen, Cliff Haby, Mark Turner (last seen in "Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay")
RATING: 2 out of 10 bicycle gears (how DO those things work, anyway?)
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