SnoopyStyle It's seven years in the future. The country is struggling with 20% of the population addicted to a new drug Substance D. In Anaheim, Bob Arctor (Keanu Reeves) is an undercover agent who wears a scramble suit which changes his appearance like a chameleon. The drug war is supported by private corporation New Path. Bob is himself addicted and starting to lose his mind.This is an unique movie of an original style. The rotorscoping animation style is hypnotic. It's not for everybody. It can be maddening to watch as the madness of this world can infect the audience. It's a visually weird movie. It gets tiring to watch. It may be better as an animated short than a full-length feature. The talkative story can also wear out its welcome.

Johan Dondokambey The story is as most of Philip K. Dick stories, marvelous at mind bending and crashing all those themes and topics. But what makes me very interested about this movie is the cinematography approach. Making this movie into an animation render from a live action is indeed very much in line with the theme of having to go undercover and suppress one's own life and live a fake life instead and gets everything confused later on. Compared to other Philip K. Dick movie adaptations such as Minority Report and Total Recall, this movie's take on the sci-fi genre is very nice and different indeed. The acting overall is very good. Keanu Reeves take in the confused and eventually demented undercover cop nicely. Robert Downey Jr. really uses his fast talking to portray a degree of drug addiction very well. Woody Harrelson is really accustomed to this kind of active role. Wynona Ryder also did great in doing her role, right until the very end.

Boba_Fett1138 With the use of rotoscoping, this clearly was an experimental project, that didn't entirely paid off, by the end.Its techniques and visual style help to make this an original movie to watch but when you look past this, the movie has little else to offer. The main story doesn't always work out that compelling, since most the time it is just meandering around and there isn't really being a good enough conflict in it story. At least not in its first half. It tries to create this but it doesn't ever get handled or developed properly enough and doesn't work out, until its last half hour, or so.For me the movie was just too often about nothing. I know that it's supposed to about the slow descent of a drug addict, so not everything is supposed to make sense or follow a fast paced, action packed main story but surely they could had spiced up things a bit more at times, with some shorter sequences, some more interesting dialog and by letting its main characters do some more interesting stuff. Some character now instead come across as redundant ones and too many of them don't help to let its story move along.And while the whole rotoscoping thing in this movie helps to make it unique and gives the movie a strong visual style, it was not something I was always too fond of or impressed with. Sometimes when the camera moved around the effects looked flat, literally. And besides, the whole effect looks like a layer, which you can simply apply to your movie, with any random big editing program. But apparently it all wasn't as easy as it looks, since post-production for this movie went on for 18 months.The one thing I did really like about this movie, was Robert Downey Jr.'s performance. It was the highlight of the movie for me and the only thing that was truly fun and interesting about it. Lots of other great actors also appear in this movie but none of them works out as well as Downey Jr. did. And no, Keanu Reeves is not horrible, his character is just kind of flat but I think this was more due to its writing and directing approach, that deliberately tried to make his character one that was more of an introvert one.An interesting movie experiment, that didn't entirely worked out but is still worth a watch.6/10 http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/

welshcheese I finished reading the book and later that day watched the film.I felt that it would be very hard to make the book in to a film due to the amount of narrative, but we have CGI and talent and money, so why not? I watched it with someone who had not read the book, and they thought they had fallen asleep in the middle and missed a bit. They had not, and found it totally confusing.I felt the funny/drug parts of the book were included in the film to help it sell, and the substance of the book was omitted.The original story is a sine wave with peaks of fun and troughs of dark paranoia, becoming more amplified as time goes on. This gave the story flow and a direction which made sense leading us to the conclusion.The film brought to life everything I imagined from the book, but lacked in depth and complexities. This prevented the many layers of paranoia and therefore gradual loss of reality being laid on top of each other, thus losing the building tension that is in the book.This should have been an Apocalypse Now length film, without the added animation effect, and the rest of the original story included. I felt the director got in to the heads of all the characters in the book fully, except for Arctors'.Perhaps you need to have been to darker side of your mind, to recognise it and therefore portray this in the film.You cant make a film just using the 'best bits' of a PKD book as it obviously doesn't work