The thing that bothers me about it all is that the rest of the movie does not give any hint of its SF origins. It appears to be about a very disturbed young man who is having visions. These things happen in real life, and are not far-fetched at all.
I can accept a fantasy explanation if the world had been established to have some supernatural elements or something, but as far as we can see it’s the real world. The conclusion therefore comes completely out of left field.
It is, in a sense, a clever twist, but only if upon reviewing the movie in your mind you see that now it all makes sense - a-la Sixth Sense. But the problem is, it doesn’t make sense. It seems, therefore, that it is a tacked on ending that hasn’t been thought through, even though, alarmingly, it in fact had been (apparently - though I suspect he was on drugs at the time).
I agree that the movie is more interesting if the possibility that Donnie is delusional is left open. My least-favorite twist ending in the world is “ha ha, the protagonist was crazy all along!”, but in Donnie Darko it’s established at the beginning that Donnie is disturbed. The question is how much of what happens to him is real. I’m not sure that “ha ha, the protagonist was sane all along!” is much better of a twist.
I think my preferred interpretation of Donnie Darko would be that Donnie is both seriously mentally ill and a character in a supernatural story. I don’t know why so many writers treat the two as being mutually exclusive. If we’re going to accept such things as possible at all then why couldn’t a person who was delusional to begin with also see into the future or whatever?
*There is the suggestion that Donnie has superhuman strength, at least when acting out Frank’s commands. (He did stick an axe in that metal statue.) But if the finale was going to hinge on Donnie’s supernatural abilities, it might have been nice to have this set up a little more clearly. I know a lot of people were puzzled as to whether he actually caused the events at the end of the movie or whether he just knew what was going to happen and went up on the mountain to watch it.
*The twist I thought was rather clever was the revelation of Frank’s identity and his connection to Donnie. After that. . .well, it did seem like an ending that was supposed to make us go “Ah, it all makes sense now!”, but it didn’t really. The whole tangent universe business just makes it worse.
Yeah, this was a flaw that really stuck out once I sat down and really thought about the plot. I suppose you could say
the schism happened at the point that Donnie left the house, and the engine just coincidentally happened to fall in both worlds
but that wouldn’t explain
why the engine is described by the director as being the catalyst for the tangent universe, and why, indeed, it is shown as such in the movie. Actually, if I’m correct in saying that the “break” happened at the moment Donnie decided to get out of bed, then the engine itself is of no particular importance. It’s his decision to leave that’s important. The tangent point at the bottom of Jack Batty’s diagram isn’t the engine hitting the house, it’s Donnie deciding to leave the house. It’s a total coincidence the engine falls in both universes. Actually, the more I think about it, the more I think this interpretation is correct.
About the deleted psychiatrist scene… yeah, I really wondered what the director was thinking with that one. Though I wish they would have left in the ending scene where
they show Donnie impaled by the engine. It’s gruesome, but he has a little smile on his face, like he knows he’s just saved the lives of all these other people, and I think it would have added a lot to the movie.
I actually really loved this movie, I thought it was very well-acted and directed, and I’m a sucker for intelligent SF movies. I even own the DVD, and I never buy movies on DVD. But there were definitely some major plot holes that shouldn’t be explained away by “oh, it’s spec-fic, go with the flow.” Even SF/fantasy movies should be internally consistent and logical, and I’m not sure this movie was. One of the things I like about it, though, is that it’s so open to interpretation. You can show it to a roomful of people and every person will probably get a slightly different interpretation of the film. So I can forgive the inconsistencies to an extent, because they make the movie more of an intellectual exercise.
How different is the director’s cut version from the original version? Is it just the bonus scenes from the DVD intercut in the movie, or is there extra stuff that wasn’t on the DVD at all?
There’s a lot of extra stuff that wasn’t there before. There are new effects shots and scenes, they’ve corrected Frank’s undistorted line of dialogue in the cinema, restored the original score and tweaked a few other things.
Why did you like the normal version better than the Director’s Cut?
I love the movie, but I am a bit hesitant to buy the Director’s Cut if it doesn’t add much to the enjoyment of the movie.
Several reasons. I think the score in the theatre cut fits the movie better - some of that’s familiarity, but The Killing Moon certainly works better with the opening sequence than Never Tear Us Apart. The new effects shots don’t add much, and two of them replace either highly effective sequences (Donnie looking into Gretchen’s wormhole trail) or important bits (Jim Cunningham’s house appearing on the cinema screen; Frank still says “Burn it to the ground”, but you no longer know what he’s referring to). The deleted scenes do mostly fit well into the movie and they work, but overall it’s not quite as elegant.
That’s roughly what I came up with on my own after watching the original version of the movie without reading any of the supplementary info or listening to the director’s commentary. The timelines obviously had to split at or before the moment when the first difference between them appears, not afterwards. I’m not sure why Kelly didn’t “get” this, since it’s his own story, and he must have devoted some thought to exactly when the timelines would diverge.
When I first saw the movie the beginning/end reminded me a bit of Quadrophenia, which opens with a brief shot of the hero walking away from the beach alone. It then cuts to an unrelate scene of the hero in the city and proceeds as a linear narrative from there, and ends with the hero heading towards the beach alone. It seems that the first scene’s chronological postion must be sometime after the last scene. In this case, the body of the film can be interpreted as an extended flashback.
In Donnie Darko, the movie opens with the hero coming down from the mountain in the early morning. He goes up the same mountain at the end. In Donnie Darko the middle portion of the film can’t exactly be a flashback in the traditional sense, but I like to think that Donnie went up the mountain in the future and coming back down in the past with “memory” of the possible future. He then chooses to avert this future the only way he can. We might imagine that he has repeated this time loop again and again before finally coming to his decision.
[spoiler]I also agree that the engine isn’t really that important, or at least shouldn’t be. What I see as the major flaw of the film is that Kelly apparently liked the image of a plane engine crashing into a house so much that he made it more significant than it should have been. The important moral decision Donnie makes isn’t whether or not to send the engine back in time, it’s whether or not he’s going to sacrifice himself for the good of others. I think the emphasis should have been more on the latter.
If Donnie knows the engine is coming and chooses to stay in his room, I don’t think it’s morally significant whether or not he was responsible for the falling engine. I think the story works just as well if we imagine that the engine was ripped off and transported back in time due to some random wormhole that Donnie had nothing to do with. He could be the only person to understand what happened rather than the person who actually caused it. I don’t think it’s necessary to make Donnie the savior of the whole universe rather than just the people around him, and I think I’ve already made it clear that I don’t like the tangent universe explanation.
If the engine simply moves back in time (whether due to Donnie’s intervention or for other reasons) rather than back in time and from one universe to the other, this also replaces the multidimensional “two places at once” problem with the more familiar and to me less annoying time travel paradoxes.[/spoiler]
Oh, for purely self-indulgent reasons I wanted to mention one last quibble I have with the film:
Gretchen and Donnie didn’t seem to have a good enough reason for leaving the Halloween party and going to Grandma Death’s house. If they had just stayed at the Darko house then both Gretchen and Frank would have lived. Fate, supernatural design, or tragic coincidence brings us most of the way to their deaths, then the chain of causality kind of breaks down. Maybe I’ve forgotten some key detail, but Gretchen and Donnie seem to leave the party mostly because the plot required it and not because they had any real motivation for doing so.
That’s pretty much how I feel about it. A few times people have asked me about this movie, and I recommend it if I think they’re up to watching something a little weird. However, I always warn them to watch it through at least once without looking at the supplementary info or listening to the director’s commentary. Since a lot of people apparently enjoy that stuff I won’t warn them away from it altogether, but I think the movie is much better if you give yourself the chance to think about it and interpret it in your own way before being exposed to the artist’s intent.
I’ve watched DD a couple times, tinkered at the website, read the material, watched the deleted scenese (my copy was before the director’s cut), and I think I am missing something in this conversation WRT to the physical interpretation of events. It had never occurred to me that [spoiler]Donnie physically left the non-tangent universe and physically arrived in the non-tangent universe in a way that would allow duplicate beings to exist.
The split had to occur some time before morning since Frank told him about it that evening, if memory serves. The cause of the split isn’t clear to me, but I don’t think it is critical.[/spoiler] I have to watch it again and refresh my memory before I engage in further discussion.
I also agree that the engine isn’t really that important, or at least shouldn’t be. What I see as the major flaw of the film is that Kelly apparently liked the image of a plane engine crashing into a house so much that he made it more significant than it should have been. The important moral decision Donnie makes isn’t whether or not to send the engine back in time, it’s whether or not he’s going to sacrifice himself for the good of others. I think the emphasis should have been more on the latter.
You’re seriously overanalysing there, Lamia.
[spoiler] It’s pretty obvious that Roberta Sparrow has been a Living Receiver and survived, or she’d never have been able to write The Philosophy of Time Travel. So, there’s clearly no need for the Living Receiver to die so long as the Artifact is sent into the wormhole.
Donnie’s laughing at the end because he’s suddenly got lots of impossible memories of being a time-travelling superhero who did lots of weird things and saved the universe, but because it’s all future stuff and he wound up exactly where he started he thinks it’s just another crazy dream or a hallucination brought on by his meds.[/spoiler]
Never occurred to me either. Which post made you think of that?
I think you may be misremembering the sequence of events a little bit, or maybe I just don’t understand what you’re saying. Here’s how things went down:
The movie opens in the morning, with Donnie up on the mountain. I’d like to interpret this moment as the “reset point” in the time loop, but it’s not necessary to do so. Either way, Donnie goes home. That evening the Darko family has dinner and Donnie’s sister announces she’d voting for Dukakis. Sometime later the sister goes out on her date. Donnie goes to bed, then goes out sleepwalking. The moment this happens is the latest possible moment when the timeline split could occur, as it’s the first apparent difference between the sequence of events we see at the beginning of the film and the alternate version at the end. The sister’s return home coincides with what Kelly claims is the moment of the timeline split. This is also just in time for the engine to crash into Donnie’s bedroom, but in this version of events Donnie is safely outside.
If I screwed any of that up, I hope someone can correct it.
It is not obvious, or even possible to guess, from the movie itself that there is any such thing as a “Living Receiver” in the first place. If you’re going to rely on the contents of the “Philosophy of Time Travel” book as it appears on the website/DVD, then
[spoiler]it does not mention that it is possible for the Living Receiver to survive. The two specific cases it does mention both end in the Living Receiver’s death, as does the only case we are shown in the movie.
The text does, however, say explicitly that once the tangent universe is taken care of then some of the Manipulated Living will still remember what happened.[/spoiler]This seems at least as “obvious” an explanation for the book as anything else.
Except that only the Living Receiver is party to some of the knowledge in the book. Only the Receiver can see the wormhole trails as described in the book, and only he knows the precise sequence of events that occurs in sending the Artifact through the portal. Also, the Manipulated Living don’t know they’re being manipulated - so only the Receiver could work that out.
[spoiler]It is my theory that some of the Manipulated Living can see the wormhole trails, etc, and remember things after the tangent universe collapses. In fact, I think that there’s a character in this tangent universe that can do that, and that’s Cherita Chen. This explains her fascination with Donnie, and the way she’s simultaneously drawn toward him and frightened of him; she knows he’s the Living Receiver, she knows the tangent universe is about to end, she can see the wormholes. This is the same thing that happened to Roberta Sparrow; she was not a Living Receiver but just a… Living Viewer?
This is not backed up by anything in the movie or the commentary. It’s just something stupid that I came up with, but it makes a lot of sense (to me). But I’ve never seen anyone else put forth this theory, so it’s probably wrong.[/spoiler]
Um, yeah, I liked the movie, but WTF is up with the spoiler boxes? Can we not discuss a movie? If someone hasn’t seen it, then they don’t click on the thread. You can even put spoiler alert in the thread title, but I had to stop reading about 10 posts down because the spoiler thing is annoying as hell./rant
I had the same initial reaction, watched it because nothing else was on and then thought it was mildly annoying. And I wondered how it became such a cult film.
But then I saw it again, and the second viewing was pretty interesting. Maybe I was paying attention more, but I caught a lot of cool stuff that I didn’t see first time around.
I like to bother Mr. Beckwall by imitating the rabbit. He hates that.
Alternatively, we could apply Occam’s Razor: Cherita has a crush on Donnie. The reasons why should be obvious.
Indygrrrl - the reason we’re using spoiler boxes is that some of the stuff under discussion only appears in the Director’s Cut of the film. This hasn’t been out for more than a few weeks (just over a week in the UK) and isn’t mentioned in the thread title.
None of that is in the movie. None of that is even in “The Philosophy of Time Travel”. You just made it up. The movie leaves enough open that I don’t think it’s possible to interpret it coherently without making stuff up, but the stuff you make up isn’t automatically superior to what anyone else makes up.
And don’t go pulling Occam’s Razor on people over this movie. It doesn’t apply to fiction, and in this case Occam’s Razor would tell us that Donnie is a delusional schizophrenic and most of what we see in the film only happened in his mind.
If you want to think you’ve stumbled onto the One True Interpretation of Donnie Darko then that’s fine and dandy, but it’s pretty obnoxious to come into a discussion thread just to tell everyone else that they’re wrong unless their interpretation is identical to yours.
That was my first, highly-charged reaction to the film. Frank scares the crap out of me. I found him to be incredibly unnerving, much the the amusement of those watching the movie with me.
After watching the movie again, and enjoying it again, I find it a little easier to ignore the creepy feelings Frank prompts in me. A few of my sister’s friends came over to watch the movie at my parents’ house while I was there, and I had an interesting time observing their reactions-- they’re all 14 years old or so. I don’t think I would have appreciated it as much when I was 14 as I did when I watched it for the first time at 18, but diff’rent strokes for diff’rent folks.