Blog News

1. Comments are still disabled though I am thinking of enabling them again.

2. There are now several extra pages - Poetry Index, Travel, Education, Childish Things - accessible at the top of the page. They index entires before October 2013.

3. I will, in the next few weeks, be adding new pages with other indexes.

Sunday 12 July 2009

Weird redux: S. Darko

Well, I have watched S. Darko, the sequel to Donnie Darko. I'd have to say it was certainly weird but by no means as weirdly incomprehensible as the reviews had led me to expect. I won't put any spoilers here, I'll just say that I had no trouble following the plot of the film, including the inevitable time travel bits (that's not a spoiler, it's fundamental to both movies). There were elements of the story that I felt weren't adequately resolved by the end of the film but I understood exactly what was going on at all times, at least as much as I understood Donnie Darko. If anything it's a bit more straightforwardly plotted.
I understand why it was straight-to-video rather than gaining a cinematic release but there's quite a lot of good stuff in it: good (though low budget) visuals, decent performances (in the main), an OK story.
The only major flaw, apart from those unresolved elements, was, I thought, that the focus was on the wrong characters. There is a much more interesting character than Donnie's Sister who could have been the focus for the film but who is given rather too small a role.
I've read that the film structure and the set pieces are too similar to the original but I didn't think so. The duplicated elements are duplicated for a reason and the background is dissimilar enough to allow that not to be a problem.

Bottom line: not as good as the original but not as bad as people have claimed, worth a look for fans of Donnie Darko. Probably to be avoided if you didn't like Donnie Darko.

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