Fever Dream

A Scanner Darkly: adapted by Richard Linklater from the Philip K. Dick novel of the same name; directed by Richard Linklater; starring Keanu Reeves (Bob Arctor); Robert Downey Jr. (James Barris); Rory Cochrane (Charles Freck); Winona Ryder (Donna Hawthorne) and Woody Harrelson (Ernie Luckman) (2006): Adapter/director Richard Linklater achieved at least three remarkable things with A Scanner Darkly: he created the most faithful movie adaptation of a Philip K. Dick novel or short story ever; he created an outstanding science-fiction film; and he maximized the limited acting ability of Keanu Reeves by casting Reeves as a burnt-out case in the midst of a drug-fueled mental breakdown.

Reeves plays Bob Arctor, a near-future California undercover government narc charged by his superiors with helping win the war against Substance D, a highly addictive illegal substance that rapidly causes irreversible brain damage in those addicted to it, partially by severing the connection between an addict's left and right brain hemispheres.

Arctor is deep undercover, sharing a house with two other addicts and buying Substance D from a third in increasingly difficult-to-supply mass quantities in the hopes of moving up the supply chain. The government knows what the main ingredient of Substance D derives from -- a small, blue-flowered plant -- but it doesn't know who is growing it, refining it, and putting it on the street.

Dick based much of A Scanner Darkly on his own drug experiences of the 1960's and 1970's, experiences which saw him committed to a mental asylum for a time, and experiences which caused him to interact with a large number of doomed and mostly doomed addicts. Indeed, the movie appends a portion of the novel's afterword to the end of the movie -- a roll call of the dead and damaged.

The hyper-colourful, rotoscoped animation Linklater uses here (he first used it in Waking Life) suits the material and the tone of that material -- the movie looks like a fever dream, a pulsating nightmare in which nothing is stable. All the principals deliver outstanding performances, including Reeves, and perhaps most notably Robert Downey Jr., who presents us with a jittery speed freak (Substance D appears to be at least partially an amphetamine) over-bursting with his own paranoid delusions and fantasies.

The title is a play on the Biblical phrase 'Through a glass, darkly': there are scanners in this movie, but they aren't the Cronenberg variety. Highly recommended.

Narcosis

Narcopolis, written by Jamie Delano, illustrated by Jeremy Rock (2008): Jamie Delano's one of those fine comic-book writers who never seems to be on anybody's radar to the extent that he should be despite terrific runs on titles that include John Constantine Hellblazer and Animal Man. Here he goes the dystopia route with a future world that mixes elements of 1984, Brave New World, and, um, tentacles.

In the future world of Narcopolis, every good citizen spends much of the day medicated in some way. The city of Narcopolis periodically launches devastating military attacks on any human settlements that exist outside itself, branding these humans as 'BadEvil' (the Orwellian homages reside mostly in the language of Narcopolis).

Citizen Gray Neighbour, one of the few people left who questions how things work and why, finds himself in a relationship with one of Narcopolis's security agents. Soon, he's been inducted into the security agency itself. But he's also on a quest to break the hold that Narcopolis's various drugs have on human consciousness in order to literally see what's really going on behind the scenes but really out in the open.

Delano does a nice job of writing future dialogue, with a host of new or mutated terms the meaning of which must be gained by paying attention to their context. Jeremy Rock's hard-eged, representational art falls into what I'd call the Avatar Press 'house style' -- cleanly depicted and seemingly mimetic, it wouldn't be out of place in a Vertigo title of the early 1990's. The miniseries ends on something of a cliffhanger, which is a bummer, so hopefully more will be on the way. Recommended.