I thought it was strange, fucked-up and I had no clue what was going on. I loved it.
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
Just saw it for the first time last week. A decent movie, but a bit overrated to deserve a cult following.
Hahaha, i’ve been quoting that line for years.
Rose!
It’s a fun movie to watch. Great music, photography, acting. Some seriously huge actors in it, too. I can’t take the plot very seriously, but that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy it on its other merits.
I have a T-shirt that says “Why are you wearing that stupid man suit?”
I saw it in college. The group I hung with had a syllabus of required movie viewing for all the new freshmen coming in: Animal House, Donnie Darko, The Boondock Saints (this was more like general required viewing in general for students in the dorms), Kids (more of a “THANK YOU SIR MAY I HAVE ANOTHER” initiation rite than a quality experience), and Doom Generation.
I liked the movie, and it even generally made sense to me, in the sense that I’m pretty sure I might understand what FLCL is about. I didn’t know WHY anything was happening, or even HOW it was happening, but the general message was clear:
[spoiler] Basically, time and space travel was happening, for whatever reason (waving hand vaguely), the engine got ripped off of an airliner by one of these portals, and was deposited into the space above Donnie’s bedroom at the time he should have been in bed. Donnie either sleepwalked (he was a troubled kid) or traveled through spacetime (vague hand-wavy-ness) and ended up at the golfcourse instead.
Everything that happened in the movie, good or bad, was because he did not die, including him meeting Gretchen and her being killed by Frank and Frank being killed by Donnie. Donnie traveled back in time so that he would be in bed and be killed by the jet engine, changing the course of events so that Gretchen would not die. Along the way, the obnoxious public speaker doesn’t get outed as a pedophile, meaning the obnoxious PTA lady doesn’t have to miss her flight, meaning that she dies instead of Donnie’s mother. Donnie’s sister presumably doesn’t make it onto the plane either because her family is grieving over Donnie, and because she’s around for the sequel. Gretchen’s life still kind of sucks (recall her family’s relationship with her dad was of the “on the run from him” variety), and Donnie’s last words to his mom are still to call her a bitch, so this movie doesn’t really get a happy ending regardless.[/spoiler]
The sequel, S. Darko, was a delightfully fun and weird movie, which completely went to shit in the third act, especially if you consider that no matter what happens:
Earth still gets attacked by fourth-dimension geometry for no apparant reason. WTF?
After being told by friends that it was the best ever, I watched the original right to the bitter end.
Personally I found it to be pretentious tripe, with lots of extraneous material ripped off from other movies to pad it out.
And as a sometime Science Fiction reader, the whole paradox resolving itself thing, wasn’t even slightly original.
I enjoy “weird” quite a bit, but not when its weird for weirds sake.
I also heard what a great movie it is. But it made no since at all to me. I think I saw the theater version.
This was the situation in which I watched it. Overrated emo crap would be my opinion on it, but L4L said a lot of my thoughts as well
love that explanation
S.Darko was CRAP
Each to their own. For me Donnie Darko is one of the classics and my test for that is whether a movie still has me thinking about it a week, a month, and a year later. Memento is another.
My all time favourite is A Clockwork Orange.
I hated it. Once you cancel out the time loop, the entirety of the film consists of:
Donnie Darko is in bed when a plane engine falls on him.
It’s a shaggy dog story.
I thought it had potential, but the closer it got to the end the more I realized that they didn’t have the slightest clue how they were going to wrap this up in any way that made any sense at all.
So it wasn’t mysteeeEEEEerious <waggles fingers>, it was just sloppy.
Seeing just the movie without any background info, I always thought the old woman who wrote that book on time travel was the source of the paradox somehow. Like she was doing some kind of experiment and caused it.
I can’t say I agree with this. I thought that S. Darko was just a pointless rehash of Donnie Darko that was presumably done just to squeeze more money out of the universe and possibly try to make it into a series. However, given the weirdness of the Darko movies, it’s possible there was some subtext in S. Darko that I missed.
Might be worth a re-watch. As I indicated previously, the movie was a lot of fun to watch right up until the third act. Maybe I’ll catch something that will make that bit make more sense.
I think the important distinction is whether or not the time loop is ever canceled, or if it merely loops back on itself and continues on its way.
The take I got from this is that Donnie saw what the world was like with him alive - with his mother, S., Gretchen, and Frank all dying, and decided that it was a fair trade if only he died (well, and the PTA lady, when you think about it too long, but maybe that was the icing on the cake for him). It is a story about a troubled teenage boy who has the chance to decide his fate and in the process protect his loved ones. It’s a horribly morbid version of Its A Wonderful World.
I’m in the “what a terrible movie” camp. Teenage emo angst with a weird tacked-on SF side-plot.
Most irritating was:
Darko goes back in time to the time of the falling engine. But, he obviously remembers the future. So all he has to do is, you know, get up and * do things differently this time *. Unless I missed the part where there were only two paths through the infinite possible alternative dimensions of time and space. Instead, he condemns his girlfriend to her crap life, lets the pedophile go, and makes us suffer through 90 minutes of teenage whining about existence only to hit the magic unwind button.
I thought it was kind of neat (I like time travel stuff), but I’m not sure why it’s a cult classic either.
Well…
[spoiler] The impression I got was that the tangent universe created by the plane engine mixup was naturally unstable, and would destroy itself on its own. Also, that said tangent universe was created specifically by Donny not being killed by the engine, which is what was “supposed” to happen. Him getting out of bed and surviving wasn’t supposed to happen, and it created the unstable tangent universe where most of the movie spends its time. He wouldn’t be able to survive without creating another tangent universe and restarting the loop.
It’s an interesting theme, when you think about it: how some things end up better in the tangent universe but that universe couldn’t be allowed to exist. Kind of reminds me of Leibniz and his “best of all possible words” philosophy. Terrible things happen, but this is still the best of all possible worlds because it’s the one that can exist.
[/spoiler]