For 99% of those who saw and admired Richard Kelly’s outstanding 2001 Hit Donnie Darko, the prospect of a sequel probably had all the appeal of sharing a confined space with lepers, or Paris Hilton, but someone decided that the remaining 1% would be sufficiently naive to cough up enough money to justify the effort. Must. Squeeze. Every. Penny. From. Successful. Film.
What we have then is a story based 7 years after Kelly’s original, now following an estranged Samantha Darko (Daveigh Chase) and her best friend Corey (Briana Evigan) on their cross-country drive to California to become dancers. They break down near a small community in Utah and are soon wrapped up in strange goings-on, reminescent of Samantha’s own experience in losing her brother to a freak, unexplainable, accident.
Comparing Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko and Chris Fisher’s S. Darko
Let’s get one thing straight: Donnie Darko did not make sense. It wasn’t meant to and Kelly’s commentary attests to that. What it did was make just enough sense to hint at greater forces at work. It created enough of a structure to be believably unfathomable, while at its heart were entirely believable characters in domestically realistic circumstances.
The sequel doesn’t make sense either, but the director/writer combination of Fisher and Atkins have utterly failed to create a sub-structure to entice our belief (or disbelief). Using the trappings of the first, even similarly going about shot composition, there’s not one conclusive piece of evidence to suggest an understanding of the more fathomable aspects of the original (such as the references to works of Edgar Allan Poe and the concepts underlying those references). There’s nothing to suggest this is anything other than a marketed re-packaging and selling of the Darko success, hypocritically summed up in the following dialogue from the film, “What kind of a man do you think I am, to try to make a buck out of another man’s death? You oughta be ashamed of yourself for even suggesting such a thing.”
It turns Donnie’s perception of a universe dictated as much by our own imagination and fears as by anything else into a effigy that looks much more like some hackneyed ghost story that fails in every regard to elicit, as Lovecraft might say, a sense of cosmic fear, while it’s trailer tries hard to convince us that this is darker and more of a horror film than its predecessor. Donnie Darko, for the record, is not a horror film, but it’s far more horrific than this.
S. Darko Cast
There’s no real cause here to criticise any of the cast, who are nonetheless pretty mediocre. We should recall, however, that the Star Wars prequels had some great actors involved – all of whom were severely undermined by awful scripts and a total void of attachment to their surroundings and characters.
Similarly, the parts here are irredeemably lacking. There’s the two girl friends – one’s bitter, one’s sweet. There’s the hunky local bad boy and the sappy local science geek. There’s a sexually deviant priest and an outcast beggar with a heart of gold. These are hardly comparative to the depth utilized in Donnie and there is a glaring lack of developed adult parts in the film, which, contrary to the first, makes it feel like a project aimed squarely at the teenage bracket. Yet more evidence then, as if any were needed, of the film’s only motivation.
Daveigh Chase (better known for her part as Samara Morgan in the Ring re-make) has the only legitimate excuse for appearing in this film, reprising her role as Donnie’s younger sister. Her role primarily requires that she parades around half naked most of the time, while expressing complex emotional states such as boredom, confusion, and...well, that’s about it. Briana Evigan is required to do even less, with her part made up of looking sexy and sounding husky.
Do forgive a complete lapse at this point in highlighting anyone else, because it’s just not worth the space as bit-part TV actors make up the numbers, excluding a few of the adults, where the much maligned Elizabeth Berkely seems to be the only committed actor on screen.
S. Darko Summary
It’s amazing that in over 100 minutes virtually nothing can be said for the progress of a plot whose only indication of forward movement is in the ‘sinister’ countdown, which couldn’t come quick enough. At what point exactly was the audience supposed to make any kind of connection to any element of the film? Maybe when the science-geek starts going Seth Brundle after touching a meteorite? Don’t ask.
The film even tries to emulate Donnie’s sublime conclusion, with the use of some music and a cross-section glance at the characters. This only highlights the gulf of difference between the two films and that S Darko has accomplished next to nothing with its characters. Of course, this one uses a more upbeat piece, as opposed to the brilliantly melancholic Mad World.
A summary here has to be harsh, as S Darko can only be described as a sequence of pointless imagery overlaid on a similarly pointless series of concepts. In a nutshell, Donnie Darko is a film that offers an intimately domestic and unknowably alien insight into why someone might feel like hanging themselves from the rafters. S. Darko is a film that will have you reaching for the nearest length of rope.
- Producer: Adam Fields
- Director: Chris Fisher
- Screenplay: Nathan Atkins
- Starring: Daveigh Chase, Briana Evigan, James Lafferty, Ed Westwick
- Released: May 2009 by 20th Century Fox and Newmarket Films
- Running Time: 103 mins
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