A Scanner Darkly: Synopsis

LOCATION:

Suburban Orange County, California.

TIME:

The near future.

America’s endless and futile war on drugs has become one and the same with its war on terror. Reluctant undercover cop Bob Arctor (Keanu Reeves) follows orders to start spying on his friends, Jim Barris (Robert Downey Jr.), Ernie Luckman (Woody Harrelson), Donna Hawthorne (Winona Ryder) and Charles Freck (Rory Cochrane). When he is directed to step up the surveillance on himself, he is launched on a paranoid journey into the absurd, where identities and loyalties are impossible to decode.

Based on legendary science-fiction author Philip K. Dick’s own experiences, “A Scanner Darkly” tells the darkly comedic, caustic, but deeply tragic tale of drug use in the modern world. The film plays like a graphic novel come to life with live-action photography overlaid with an advanced animation process -- a method known as interpolated rotoscoping, first employed in writer/director Richard Linklater’s 2001 film "Waking Life" -- to create a haunting version of America, seven years from now.

Philip K. Dick has slowly but steadily become a cultural icon with his works of mind-bending fiction. His first novel debuted in 1955, and ever since, his cumulative works have sold roughly 20 million copies and been translated to 25 different languages.

Considered by some measures to be the most adapted science-fiction author in the history of film, Dick has created futuristic worlds in many of his works, several of which have been adapted into feature films: “Blade Runner,” based on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?; “Total Recall,” based on the short story “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale;” “Screamers,” based on the short story “Second Variety;” the French film “Confessions d’un Barjo,” based on “Confessions of a Crap Artist;” and “Minority Report,” “Impostor” and “Paycheck,” based on works of the same name.