The first 27 minutes of A Scanner Darkly rocks…

The first 27 minutes of A Scanner Darkly rocks…

Apr 18

I spent the weekend attending a bi-mon-sci-fi-con sort of dealy, NorWesCon. I have friends who write sci-fi, and NorWesCon is where they give out the Philip K Dick award, so there are a lot of writers in attendance, lots of book dealers, lots of publisher parties to scam into, cool people to hang out with and have conversations that don’t involve Star Trek, that sort of thing. Overall, a fun way to spend a few days.

The highlight this year (besides watching two elderly nerds nearly come to blows over a political debate) was that Warner provided the first 27 minutes of A Scanner Darkly. I have two points to make:

Firstly, I’m very disappointed in the nerds in attendance. The segment was to run at the end of an hour and a half of movie trailers. These are trailers that are online. They’ve seen them before. And yet they booed the guy running the show when he announced they were short on time and would skip the X3 trailer. And when he announced to stick around for A Scanner Darkly, about half didn’t. They just weren’t interested. Some nerds they were.

Secondly, the first 27 minutes was just awesome. Having made a point of reading the book before the movie hit theaters, I can tell you it’s pretty damn close to the book. The only real alteration is that it’s not set in the 70s, it’s “7 years from now”. Every other change I noticed were omissions – little things that aren’t needed in the movie (and for all I know may appear later in the film.)