I have to confess that I was disappointed by the recent release of A Scanner, Darkly. Being a Philip K. Dick fan, and having heard that it had garnered rave reviews across the board, I was genuinely excited about seeing it. However, having had to wait over a month since the US release to see it in the UK, I have to say that I don't think it was worth it.

I was surprised at how closely it followed the book, and while it certainly was ambitious, in a way I thought it was actually lazy not to depart very far from the original text. The film seemed to be more a reading of the novel, with tedious lengths of dialogue lifted straight from it, rather than a proper adaptation.

Similarly, the visual style pioneered by Linklater in Waking Life seemed an excuse not to use any interesting visual devices throughout the film. In fact the animation in Scanner was rather lacklustre compared to the earlier film, with barely any exaggeration - it merely used rotoscoping and fudged the perspective to make poorly animated objects look right. The scene with the aphids was particularly uninspiring compared to how it was described in the book, and in general the whole film would have benefited from being live action rather than rotoscoped.

The film did pick up towards the end, but it was not enough to save it in my opinion, and while it is not an awful film by any measure, it certainly is not the magnificent achievement that the critics have elevated it to.