Complete Dorko: 'S. Darko'

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DIRECTOR'S DON'T MAKE cult films. Audiences do. Attempts to create a movie specifically for a small, intense audience usually fall flat either artistically or commercially (see: "Napoleon Dynamite").

Instead, flops, forgotten films, or failed experiments must be discovered, shared with friends, passed along. That process cannot be goaded along by marketers, but must happen on its own.

Take "Donnie Darko," the 2001 head-scratcher starring Jake Gyllenhaal as a confused teenager who is either emotionally troubled or trapped in a tangent universe. When Richard Kelly's remarkably well-imagined and surprisingly poignant debut first premiered, it was roundly snubbed by critics as simply too weird, too overblown, too impenetrable, and it barely had a theatrical release. On DVD, "Donnie Darko" finally found an audience fascinated by its labyrinthine theories of time travel and strange memories of the late '80s; its fanbase was so avid that they even criticized Kelly for releasing a director's cut.

Smart and self-contained, "Donnie Darko" needed no sequel, but producer Jim Busfield, screenwriter Nathan Atkins, and director Chris Fisher have made one anyway. "S. Darko" seems primarily like an attempt to capitalize on Kelly's cult flick, but even though it takes some bold narrative liberties, the results are overwrought and underthought. It's not even an interesting failure, just a dull movie self-impressed with its own borrowed pretensions.

Of course it was straight-to-DVD. No one apart from the cast and crew are interested, and Kelly was not involved with the production in any capacity. "I was aware that there would probably be backlash doing it," says Fisher in the making-of featurette, "but I didn't think it would be as strong as it has been." At least it announces its disingenuousness at the outset, opening with a lengthy exposition scrolling up the screen and explaining the set-up: Seven years after the events of the first movie, Samantha Darko (Donnie's younger sister and originally only a minor character) has run away from home. Breaking the show/don't tell rule, that artless exposition feels cheap and condescending after Kelly trusted his audience to follow the convoluted metaphysics of "Donnie Darko."*

Despite its head-trip reputation, there was a well-thought-out mythology underlying "Donnie Darko," such that even if you didn't get it, you felt there was something there to get. In "S. Darko," there's something about an addled Gulf War vet, a missing child, a meteorite, and a car crash, but there's not much sense to it all. Fisher relies too heavily on "Donnie" for unearned import and eeriness — he lifts a few shorts almost directly from that movie — but seems uninterested with any facet of time travel, conspiracy theory, numerology, or even personal sacrifice. Instead, "S. Darko" treats the tangent universes and time warps as nothing more complex than crying "do over."

The only returning cast member is Daveigh Chase, who plays Samantha. Chase is a twitchy, gangly actress who resembles a young Michelle Trachtenberg (of "Buffy" fame), and she doesn't always seem to know what to do with her long limbs. She wraps them around herself or tucks them under her, as if protecting herself from loose plot threads. Although the wardrobe department does her no favors, she's the most interesting visual aspect of the film and could be very compelling with the right material.

Still, "S. Darko" is a mess of a movie — unnecessary, uninspired, unenlightening. But who knows? Maybe some viewers will find some meaning in the muddle and make it a cult film after all, if they can get all the way through it.

» NERD NOTES:

The opening exposition contains a grievous misreading of the Darko mythology.

SPOILER: If you don't want to know the ending of "Donnie Darko," read no further.

The opening "S. Darko" crawl states that Donnie was crushed by a jet engine that fell from the sky and that "the government never located the plane from which the engine fell." The unidentified engine actually fell in the tangent universe; in the real universe, the engine that killed Donnie ostensibly fell from the plane carrying his mother and sister home from Los Angeles. It's never stated whether the real-world engine was identified or not.

Further nerding out: The two films playing at the local theater are "12 Monkeys" and "Strange Days." However, "S. Darko" is set in July 1995, and those movies weren't released until December and October of that year, respectively.

Written by Express contributor Stephen M. Deusner

Images courtesy BHImpact/20th Century Fox