Keanu Reeves Movie:

		List Price: $28.99		Label: Warner Home Video Salesrank: 1265 Released: April 10, 2007
		Our Price: $6.49
		Used Price: $8.50
		MPAA Rating: R (Restricted) Media: Blu-ray

Editorial Review:
Set in a not-too-distant future where America has lost its "war" on drugs, Fred, an undercover cop, is one of many people hooked on the popular drug, Substance D, which causes its users to develop split personalities. Fred is obsessed with taking down Bob, a notorious drug dealer, but due to his Substance D addiction, he does not know that he is also Bob. Based on a classic novel by Philip K. Dick. Starring Keanu Reeves ("Constantine," "The Matrix" trilogy), Academy Award-nominee and Golden Globe-winner Winona Ryder ("Girl, Interupted," "Mr. Deeds"), Academy Award and Emmy-nominee and Golden Globe-winner Robert Downey Jr. ("Good Night, And Good Luck" "Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang"), and Academy Award and Golden Globe-nominee and Emmy-winner Woody Harrelson ("North Country," "The People vs. Larry Flynt"). Directed by Academy Award-nominee Richard Linklater ("Before Sunset," "Dazed and Confused"). Filmed in live-action, and then animated using the same critically acclaimed process that Linklater used in his previous film, "Waking Life."

Description of A Scanner Darkly [Blu-ray]:
How well you respond to Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly depends on how much you know about the life and work of celebrated science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. While it qualifies as a faithful adaptation of Dick's semiautobiographical 1977 novel about the perils of drug abuse, Big Brother-like surveillance and rampant paranoia in a very near future ("seven years from now"), this is still very much a Linklater film, and those two qualities don't always connect effectively. The creepy potency of Dick's premise remains: The drug war's been lost, citizens are kept under rigid surveillance by holographic scanning recorders, and a schizoid addict named Bob Arctor (Keanu Reeves) is facing an identity crisis he's not even aware of: Due to his voluminous intake of the highly addictive psychotropic drug Substance D, Arctor's brain has been split in two, each hemisphere functioning separately. So he doesn't know that he's also Agent Fred, an undercover agent assigned to infiltrate Arctor's circle of friends (played by Woody Harrelson, Winona Ryder, Rory Cochrane, and Robert Downey, Jr.) to track down the secret source of Substance D. As he wears a "scramble suit" that constantly shifts identities and renders Agent Fred/Arctor into "the ultimate everyman," Dick's drug-addled antihero must come to grips with a society where, as the movie's tag-line makes clear, "everything is not going to be OK."

While it's virtually guaranteed to achieve some kind of cult status, A Scanner Darkly lacks the paranoid intensity of Dick's novel, and Linklater's established penchant for loose and loopy dialogue doesn't always work here, with an emphasis on drug-culture humor instead of the panicked anxiety that Dick's novel conveys. As for the use of "interpolated rotoscoping"--the technique used to apply shifting, highly stylized animation over conventional live-action footage--it's purely a matter of personal preference. The film's look is appropriate to Dick's dark, cautionary story about the high price of addiction, but it also robs performances of nuance and turns the seriousness of Dick's story into... well, a cartoon. Opinions will differ, but A Scanner Darkly is definitely worth a look--or two, if the mind-rattling plot doesn't sink in the first time around. --Jeff Shannon

A Scanner Darkly [Blu-ray] Reviews:
It appealed to my tastes but I am probably in the minority on this one.
2009-09-13 - Great Blu Ray transfer and a cool movie. Unfortunately I had to watch this alone because no one else was able to get through the first ten minutes. Therefore this is obviously not to everyones tastes and despite the impressive cast this is my no means a mainstream film. If you haven't seen this then try renting it first.

If you have seen this before and would like to buy it then the blu ray transfer is great, extras are minimal and probably just ported over from the DVD, the sound is only DD5.1. There are no lossless audio tracks but this a dialogue driven film and its probably not a major issue.

Loved it!
2009-09-09 - I loved this movie and wanted to buy one, so I got it new and the shipment was super speedy! Great packaging and no problem with the dvd whatsoever. I just bought a book and hope to get it soon, can't wait to start reading it, since it's only sold online and it's not checkable in libraries yet.

Get this movie if you love the actors in the movie like I do. I'm a Keanu fan. And love to see in Animated format. This movie was very interesting b/c they used actors and CG ontop, to create this movie. It's facinating how so much work goes into making a movie.

Their prices here are a lot cheaper than other places, so buying has been very nice. I hope to continue shopping here in the future.

Dick put to good Use
2009-05-26 - I like Dick, having been lured by a 'Rollingstone' article on him in the 70s. By then, he was already a cult figure. I read Scanner and 'The 3 Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich' and was seriously disorientated. And this without recourse to anything but the written word; P K Dick's words. No other sci fi writer has touched me so. And here, Linklater has struck upon a perfect filmic technique to attempt to translate the altered states of consciousness that so obsessed Dick. This is a film brimming with info and insight. And it looks suave, and suitably deadpan simultaneously. Loved it! And definitely will give it a re-run.

Form over substance
2009-03-09 - Form over substance! Dialogue is monotonous and sleep-inducing. Plot is not terribly intriguing. The only cool aspect is the "cartoonization" of the actors. Overall, go watch something else.

New Age Art ??
2009-03-01 - OMG! The plot line might of been good I do not know as I could not stand to watch this form of animation.The way the artists drew the faces of these characters was terrible.The shadows of the faces were like they were moving all the time,it was madness to watch.It was like the shadows had a life of their own and it was very irritating to watch,so I quit after about ten minutes.I could not stand to watch it.It drove me nuts.