Two Slashes

Wanted:  two hours of my life back.  Wasted them watching S.Darko, looking for someone with time machine or means to reclaim time.  Will compensate handsomely.  Please contact me if you can help.  If you can’t help, I’d like to take this moment to warn of potential spoiler alerts for both Darko movies.

It’s funny how something you had just a little hope for (just a little, mind you) can turn out to be so disappointing.

Somewhere around a year and a half ago, I was introduced to Donnie Darko by a bunch of guys in my dorm.  We watched one or two movies (occasionally as many as five) every Friday night, with our choices usually being something at least one person in the group hadn’t seen before.  It worked out well, because the movies were all enjoyable, and we tended to lean towards the thought-warping titles (think The Matrix if you need a well-known example) more than the cheesy action flicks.  (Alright, maybe we had a Die Hard marathon in there at some point, but…well, yippie ki yay, I seem to be running off in tangents here.)

Is it me, or does the smaller "S" almost remove the idea that this is about Samantha rather than Donnie?

To quit beating around the bush, suffice it to say that I enjoyed Donnie Darko at least as much as any other movie I watched with that group.  It had a certain ring to it that, at some level, I hoped would be carried on, though I knew that ultimately any attempt to extend the story would ruin the mystique, just as the Wachowskis are blamed for doing with The Matrix Reloaded and Revolutions.  And that’s where S.Darko, and the point of this post, come into play, as they do just the same thing.

I’ll try not to give too much away as far as this review goes, but suffice it to say that I found the film rather ridiculous right from the get-go.  The movie starts off with a Star Wars-esque block of text scrolling up the screen to give you the backstory for the film, though I felt that it really didn’t do much explaining:

Middlesex, Virginia. 1988.

Donnie Darko was killed when a jet engine fell from the sky and crushed him while he was sleeping.  The government never located the plane from which the engine fell, nor did they even admit the incident ever occurred.  But that was just the beginning of the tragedy…and the mystery.

Now, 7 years later, Donnie’s youngest sister, Samantha, seemingly alone and lost in the world, has run away from a home shattered by the death of her brother.  Drowning in sadness and unable to dream, she has drifted deeper and deeper into the darkness of her sleep.  And when darkness consumes the starlight, nightmares rule the night.

The first pair of sentences neatly sums up the first movie for those who never saw it.  Except for, you know, the whole government admission part.  (Weren’t those workers there removing the engine and investigating at the end of the movie? )  Ignoring that nasty, comma-filled sentence about Samantha running away, the rest of this blurb reads exactly like I would expect it to if I were watching a horror film.  (That’s funny, I don’t see ‘horror’ listed at IMDB.)  “And when darkness consumes the starlight, nightmares rule the night…”?  Seriously?

Of course, that’s just the first few seconds of the movie.  Things don’t get much better, as just about everything has some special effect to “enhance” it (extreme overuse of time-rewinds, anyone?), and they reuse a lot of the concepts from Donnie Darko so blatantly that it gets hard to tell whether any original content even went into this film.  There are also numerous plot holes, such as how Roberta Sparrow’s book comes to be in Samantha’s ownership as it was never given to Donnie in the first place (thinking through the timeline of the first movie).

This isn't the best pair of images to be using for a comparison, but they look similar to me (compensating for the age difference, of course). Yeah, Jim, I'm just as surprised as you are.

Some of the actor choices seem almost intentionally designed to get your memory drawn elsewhere.  One character bears (what I call) a strong resemblance to Jake Gyllenhaal, while another looks almost like a younger version of Jim Carrey in his role as Edward Nygma (“The Riddler”) from Batman Forever.  In one scene of the movie, I almost want to say there’s a slight resemblance to Javier Bardem in there, too.

At times, I also got a subtle preachy vibe, almost like the movie was trying to be an infomercial for God rather than a source of entertainment (HAHA!  HA! Ha…ha…eh…), which I found an amusing juxtaposition with the supposed supernatural components of the film.  I couldn’t identify exactly what the writers were trying to go for given what little development the characters involved went through, but it certainly could have used a little work.

In short, I was rather disappointed with the movie from all aspects.  It’s not the worst thing I’ve seen, but I would much rather watch something else.  If I had to place it on a scale somewhere, it would probably land between “I’d rather walk around in public wearing a bikini swimsuit” and “I’d rather listen to Ben Stein sing in the shower.”  (I love arbitrary scales, don’t you?)

Oh, and if you want a lesson in how NOT to design your user interface, you should check out the movie’s web site.  I particularly recommend trying to read the synopsis and cast lists they provide in their entirety without shooting yourself.