S. Darko

Donnie Darko was a massive hit for Richard Kelly in 2001, making stars of Jake Gyllenhaal, his sister Maggie and Kelly himself. S. Darko appeared eight years later as a loose sequel, picking up the story seven years on from the events that took place in Richard Kelly's film and following Donnie's younger sister Samantha. Traumatised after her older brother was crushed by a mysterious jet engine, Sam is sick of life in Virginia where she is simultaneously recognised by everyone yet treated as if she were invisible so has taken to the road with her best friend Corey on a trip to California where she hopes to build upon her success with Sparkle Motion and become with Corey's father's help, a professional dancer.

Unfortunately, their car breaks down just outside the one horse town of Conejo Springs in Utah and they are given a ride into town by Randy, the local bad boy, who introduces them to Frank, who tells them that it will take a couple of days to secure a new water pump and that the tow was only free to customers. Stuck in the town and with barely enough money to stay in the rundown motel, they have no choice but to wait it out and meet the townsfolk. Predictably enough, as this is a movie, smalltown America is populated by weird and wonderful people hence Conejo Springs is covered by 'Missing' posters for Randy's younger brother, Billy. Most people suspect Justin Sparrow, a veteran of Operation Desert Storm who has had trouble readjusting to civilian life and keeps himself to himself and there is also Jeremy, the geeky kid who takes a shine to Samantha.

Just as Samantha's somnambulist activities mean that she wakes up in various parts of the town, Justin is plagued by visions of a future Samantha telling him that the world will end in 4 days, 17 hours, 26 minutes and 31 seconds and so, when Samantha arrives, Justin weirdly informs her that "she told me you would come". There are various echoes of Donnie Darko in this sequel so that Justin, with reference to the town's Church, is told to "burn it to the ground", Samantha carries around The Philosophy of Time Travel along with her story about Ariel the unicorn, a Princess and a boy called Justin, a red car driven by an irresponsible teen and, with a meteorite having destroyed the town's windmill at the beginning of the film and Justin crafting himself a huge metal mask in the shape of a rabbit's head, you pretty much know who is going to be at the centre of the time travel event and what will be the 'vessel'.

S. Darko is, to be frank, a fairly weak movie that was really only made because of the huge success of Donnie Darko and that, in that film, Samantha didn't really feature and so there was room to explore her character and what happened following her brother's untimely demise. Given the enormous cult following that the original film continues to have, S. Darko really had enormous shoes to fill as any film that was a follow-up to a movie as popular and loved as Donnie Darko was (and is) really needed to be something special in order to live up to the massive expectations. The fact that this was a straight to DVD film immediately lowers your expectations as, if the production company had any faith in it, it would have had a theatrical release, however small.


The problem with S. Darko begins with the lead performance by Daveigh Chase who hasn't really done anything of note since she came to public attention in 2001 and is fairly weak in this. It also doesn't help that, although his career has failed to live up to the promise of his debut film, Richard Kelly isn't involved and is only credited at the end as "Based on Characters Created by" and screenwriter Nathan Atkins and director Chris Fisher aren't really names that spring out as neither of them have done anything that grabs your attention and make you think "Oh, a Chris Fisher film -- I really must watch that". Having watched Donnie Darko numerous times, I am fairly familiar with the format and the concepts explored within so that once you have met everyone in Conejo Springs, seen the meteorite and Samantha's tendency to sleepwalk, you can really just join the dots and figure out exactly who and what is going to fill the roles laid out in the template from Richard Kelly's film.

It's not that S. Darko only fails because it doesn't live up to the promise of the original film, it's just that the film is just so uninspiring, so dreadfully mediocre and is just a 'paint by numbers' retread of the formula laid out in the first film that took the world by storm. Knowing that this was a movie that failed to secure a theatrical release, I curbed my expectations and, even then, S. Darko failed to live up to them. There are very few, if any, sequels that definitively surpass the original movie and this is a movie that is just so dispiriting in its lack of ambition, merely following the formula laid out in Donnie Darko but with plenty of references to that film so that fans have something to occupy their minds whilst watching events unfold.

The Disc

Extra Features
The commentary is with director Chris Fisher, director of photography Marvin V. Rush and writer Nathan Atkins and they talk well together with Fisher holding the thing together, talking the most, and pointing the other two crew members in the right direction, asking for their contributions when they would be most appropriate. Love it or loathe it, this commentary is worth a listen either way.

Utah Too Much is a brief and frankly unnecessary featurette about the song Utah Too Much, its background and performance.

The Making of S. Darko is a 15 minute piece comprising of interviews with members of the cast and crew, behind-the-scenes and B-roll footage. It is a fairly perfunctory making of featurette and is a shame that it is only in standard definition.

Finally, there is a selection of deleted scenes, running at just over six minutes and also in SD. Without any introduction or commentary, you don't know why the scenes were cut or where they would have fit into the film but I can't imagine that the movie would have improved much with their inclusion.


The Picture
As this was a straight to DVD film (or, in this case, straight to Blu-ray), which was shot on high-definition digital, you would expect a great deal of time and effort to go into the audio and visuals and it really shows with excellent visual effects, editing and an excellent high definition picture. The colours are vibrant, contrast levels deep and allow for a great deal of clarity in the darker scenes and the costumes, production design and set decoration are all top-notch. The dream sequences involving a 'future' Samantha look appropriately otherworldly and the SFX make-up work done on Daveigh Chase is pretty convincing.

There is even some underwater footage which looks terrific and you can pick out the tiny bubbles on the underside of Daveigh Chase's arm.


The Sound
There is only one audio track which is, appropriately enough for a film designed for home viewing, DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1. This track has crystal clear dialogue, a decent level of bass for the sequences in which Justin hits the 'force field' and, overall, this is a very impressive soundstage.

I didn't really notice the score which can be a good thing as, if the music is far from overpowering and subtle enough to add to emotions and more emotive scenes without you noticing then the composer has really done their job well.

One of the major features of Donnie Darko was the choice of source music which firmly cemented the film in 1988, opening with Echo & The Bunnymen and featuring Duran Duran, Tears for Fears and Joy Division and, although Chris Fisher has picked up a decent array of music from 1995, I don't remember listening to any of it that year as, for me and just about everyone else in the UK, that year and the ones either side of it were all about 'Britpop' and bands like Oasis, Blur and Pulp rather than Dead Can Dance.


Final Thoughts
I hoped S. Darko would be an interesting follow-up to the 2001 cult classic that, like its predecessor, would demand several viewings (plus the commentary) so that I can figure out exactly what was going on and to fully appreciate events on screen. This made it all the more disheartening when the film was so extremely unchallenging and I found myself figuring out exactly how it would end way before the film reached that point. Anyone with a working understanding of Donnie Darko will be in exactly the same position as they know how the whole 'self-sacrifice to save the world' plot works and, as this doesn't really different from Richard Kelly's original film, you find yourself ahead of the film waiting for the screenwriter to catch up with you -- film should work the other way round.

Donnie Darko worked as a stand-alone film so didn't need a sequel but, if it had to have one, it would have to be good and, to be brutally honest, S. Darko isn't half the film that its older brother was. Compounding matters is the below par package which, although boasting extremely good AV quality, the extra features just don't stand up to scrutiny.