Ok, this is going to be quick but I was browsing around today on IGN and I found this headline in the DVD Review section:
Both disc and film fail to live up to the Philip K. Dick source material.This is for the film A Scanners Darkly.
Ok, so this sounded odd, but maby this guy has something to say. So I read the review, and I find totaly bullshit crap like the folowing:
And while some may deride it as a lazy, artsy-fartsy gimmick, it adds a glossy dimension that the convoluted and confusing story itself lacks.So basicaly this guy wanted some explosion with a paper thin plot. Something no Philip K. Dick story ever really has. Yea right...
But wait, there is more!
While some of this sounds similar to Minority Report's plot of a homicide cop trying to discover why he's seen as guilty of committing a murder that hasn't happened yet, it makes little sense here because his orders come from a scramble suited superior who is unaware that Fred is Arctor. Oppressive corporate-government authority structures were steady themes in Dick's work and the world of A Scanner Darkly is one where all communications are monitored, but the tossed-off explanation as to why Fred's superior wouldn't know who his agent really is  that information is held higher up the food chain  doesn't make sense. Also, the only place we see the scramble suits in action is within the confines of the police station, never on the street. What's the big secret? Why are the all-seeing eyes and ears struck blind and deaf in certain places? Who's controlling the color-coded lights over the doors that direct Fred movements within the station? Why don't any officers see anyone else in and out of their scramble suits? All unanswered questions.Yea, they never explain it in the book eather. Heck, the movie actually cleared some stuff up by having Donna be Hank, in the original, Hank was never revealed to who he was.
Also, I guess he was thinking too much of explosions because they did explain why the wear the suits durning work, they are undercover DA Agents. When you are an undercover cop, you do not flash other cops your badge, you have to play low. You have to totally belive you are one of the bad guys untill they arest you, then your higher up in the Goverment will let you go, heck they might keep you there just so you can find out more info in Prision. The suit is so that word dose not get out that you are that person on the street, as well as that the department will not arest you while you are trying to do your job.
Morons!
The intrinsic themes of A Scanner Darkly  identity, addiction, paranoia, the intangibility of reality  could be provocative, but in Linklater's rote rendition, they're lost in the abyss of misdirected focus and unclear storytelling. Dick was a lifelong amphetamine abuser and the novel was heavily autobiographical, though he'd finally cleaned up by the time of its writing in 1977. When viewed through this prism, the story becomes even less meaningful because it is reduced to one man's personal delusions and without a clear idea of what is real in Bob/Fred's world, there is little for us to relate to. Memento's backwards storytelling allowed the viewer to share in the hero's confusion while being able to eventually understand most of what had happened. Here the last act revelations add some context, but raise even more questions and we're left as in the dark as to what really happened as Bob/Fred is.Yup, just like the book. This guy, funny enough, dose not know Dick. It looks like he just searched up a Wikipedia article on Dick and used that, rather reading the book. If he is going to complain about things that happended in the book, but did not read it himself, than he cannot blame the film for its shortcommings to the book if the movie is folowing the book key by key.
What an ass!
While the visual look of the film is cool and appropriate in setting up the milieu, the ambiguous storytelling and tiresome depictions of paranoid junkie behavior  we get it: drugs are bad, mmmkay?  swallow the interesting themes that are revealed in the end. An edgier hard sci-fi take on the socio-political aspects would have been more interesting than the slacking life we get from Linklater.Wait, this guy just said he wanted more explosions, wtf dose this guy want more true Philip K. Dick plot and storytelling for if he cannot understand something as simple as this? Heck, all the past Dick movies, even Blade Runner were dumbed down enough so that audences could understand WTF was going on, and they only sccratched the surface. They never went anymore deep than "Figuring out why I predicted I am going to kill someone" and "I have to hunt down this andriod because its my job".
So here is a story that dose what the book says, since the prick who wrote this says the book is the good source material, and it fails? If the story fails, then the book fails since the movie was a virtual picture perfict addaption of the book. So how the heck can the book be better than the movie?
http://dvd.ign.com/articles/752/752200p1.htmlAll and all, these are the type of people that should have been aborted at fetal stage. In the same lime light, along with the Ebert review of V for Vendetta saying "I have no idea what Cultural Revolution and being Rebelment from a Higher Power means" tells me one thing -- the United States is nothing but one big dumb cattle farm.
Sad, sad world indeed.
