S. Darko

I'm going to have to break my own rules here and post out of the Thursday slot, because I've just watched something so absolutely terrible that I cannot not write about it right now.

S. Darko, aka Samantha Darko, is a sequel to Donnie Darko: a cult hit that happens to be one of my favorite films of this decade. Now, I'll preface this whole review by describing a complicated facet of the "series" in a simple way...There's a ghostly apparition who says the world's going to end, and afterwards the titular character experiences crazy visions involving bubble-like paths extending from peoples' chests, among other things. In Donnie Darko this was handled extraordinarily well, with a well-crafted, scientific and pseudo-religious explanation that ultimately left much to the viewer to contemplate. S. Darko takes it one step backward...

S. Darko was -to put it crudely- a steaming pile of shit. Everything they did, minus casting decisions (which were all surprisingly good), was garbage riding the coattails of an infinitely better movie. Don't let my love of its predecessor lead you to believe I'm biased merely because of that. No, I gave this movie a fair chance, ignoring the shoddily put together beginning as well as the lack of any character development. I tried so hard to look at it as a standalone movie with loose connections to Donnie Darko-- you know, like a spinoff where a character goes off and has zany adventures; like Fraser did when he got his own show, or Joey (though I've never seen that show). S. Darko is more like if Claire's son Aaron from Lost got his own show where, after growing up, was kayaking on a river and ended up in a junkyard with no way to escape and there were Others there, as well as grey sludge (as opposed to black mist) that nobody fully knows what it is. The kicker: no questions are answered because no legitimately interesting situations/problems arise to spark your interest. That's a lot of little television references, but that's what this movie felt like. Honestly, I could find a better plot on an episode of Cheaters, and that would still feel less trashy than this film.

Story-wise, it's been seven years since Donnie Darko and Samantha, the youngest of the three Darko children, has run off with her buddy on a cross-country road trip to California. Car breaks down and Chuck Bass picks them up and takes them to a Podunk town where the citizens are all suspicious and on a manhunt for Nathan Scott, who is extremely P.T.S. syndrome. A meteorite crashes into a windmill, which mirrors the jet engine scene from the first, and then everything goes to Hell from there. Jasper Cullen buys the meteorite (and he's a complete geek) which leads to his eventual decline as an interesting character in the movie, and slowly the plot goes from "potential" to "why am I watching this?", though, I should warn you: when I say slowly I mean a velocity so fast that it appears stationary.
Oh, also the tag line, or even the freaking title should have been "how many times can we rip off and sodomize things from the previous installment?" Wait, "how many times can we kill, then bring back Samantha in ONE movie!?" works, too.

Anyway, I really do need to stop there. If given the time and means of sustenance, I believe I could rant on just how abysmal this movie is for days...if you paid to watch it, I'm sorry. If you haven't gone to see it yet, or are a hopeful fan of the awesome of Donnie Darko carrying over into a sequel: stay away, for the love of God, stay far away