Scanning Darkly: Some films of philip K Dick

Keanu Reeves’ latest identity crisis, A Scanner Darkly, is set to hit our cinema screens anytime now. Richard Linklater’s take on legendary science fiction author Philip K Dick’s classic tale of drug use and abuse has been shot using rotoscope techniques to give the picture an appropriately spaced-out distortion, and the indie auteur’s film is widely being hailed as the best Dick movie yet. This acclaim is due in no small part to the Dick estate’s approval of the project, which has famously not been given to any of the previous adaptations of his work.

Early glimpses of footage indicate that Linklater has managed to capture the paranoid atmosphere of the source novel perfectly, and with the likes of Woody Harrelson, Robert Downey, Jr and Winona Ryder supporting Reeves it seems the film may well live up to the hype surrounding it, but to better predict the future of A Scanner Darkly, let us look into the past of Hollywood’s dabblings with the master of sci-fi paranoia…

Previous films based on Dick’s work – most notably Blade Runner and Total Recall – have been successful movies in their own right despite having been changed significantly from the original story.

Ridley Scott’s 1980 classic Blade Runner, based on the short story Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, has been re-edited and re-released into at least three different versions, and Scott’s recent efforts to revisit the film and produce a definitive Director’s Cut for the DVD market have proved abortive as the rights to the film are no longer owned by the studio.

Similarly Paul Verhoeven’s Schwarzenegger violence-fest Total Recall, which was based on another short story We Can Remember it Wholesale for You, did not bear much resemblance to Dick’s vision by the time it arrived in cinemas in 1988 and, as much fun as it undoubtedly was, was promptly denounced by Dick’s family.

Not all Dick movie adaptations have been so unfaithful to his work though; 2002’s Minority Report, the long-awaited first collaboration of movie giants Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise, did not stray too far from Dick’s writing and was a hugely successful and entertaining film. Like A Scanner Darkly, Minority Report is concerned with issues of identity and drug use, the two most predominant themes throughout Dick’s writing.

Gary Fleder’s Impostor, starring Gary Sinise, was released almost concurrently with Minority Report and, with all due respect, was more than likely green lit on the back of the hype surrounding Spielberg’s film. Far from being a quick cash-in, though, Impostor is an intelligent thriller which, despite a handful of glaring inconsistencies, hits the right sci-fi buttons much more than it misses them.

While there are similarities between the two stories, most obviously the central character having to go on the run to clear his name, Fleder’s film stands up well against its blockbuster rival.

Perhaps the weakest adaptation of a Dick story so far is 2003’s Paycheck, directed by erstwhile Hong Kong action auteur and present-day master of vacuous gunplay John Woo. While the previous Dick films have had their fair share of action, the stories have remained (with the possible exception of Total Recall, which like many Verhoeven films is actually far cleverer than you might expect) at the more intelligent end of the science fiction spectrum.

Paycheck is the unfortunate exception. Despite the best efforts of Ben Affleck and Uma Thurman, the film is a mess as confused as Thurman must have been about her presence in such a film after the success of the Kill Bill movies.