One of the worst movies I have seen.

Rating: 1/10 (20 February 2004)

I have no doubt in my mind that the director of this film is an idiot.
Absolute garbage: the whole film. Drew Barrymore's performance was nothing short of the worst thing I'd seen. I finished watching the film with horror. It was that awful.
Let me be frank, I think it's totally the director's fault. The film's premise is interesting and the plot twists had the potential to be fun, but the entire endeavor was marred by an inherent lack of intelligence.
The director, I have no doubt, saw Donnie Darko as a superheroic, Christ-like figure who was doomed to sacrifice himself for the good of humanity. The film attempts to use magical realism to make its point. Your thinking: Never Ending Story, Star Wars, Willow... If only. I didn't like those films much either, but at least they weren't trying as hard as Donnie Darko to be internally consistent. Donnie Darko is very American, very Christian, and entirely too self-righteous in its portrayal of "truth". What's worse, it's plot has holes large enough to pass elephants through, so the filmmakers don't even have a right to act that way. In a nutshell, the plot has NO LOGICAL CONSISTENCY. The characters are undeveloped and the acting is reminiscent of a high school play. Not to mention the whole premise of the movie centers around an acceptance of "time travel" that is entirely pedestrian. Yes, modern physics speaks about time travel. No, it looks NOTHING LIKE what is presented in Donnie Darko. I wouldn't care, but they are attempting to actually present it like they are saying something along those lines. Like a B-Movie Science Fiction Flick from the 50s, the movie throws scientific and deductive ideas around without actually having researched them or patiently thinking about the consequences. I don't in principle mind when people get things wrong, but this movie comes across as a self-righteous attempt to be right. When you're trying to be right and the stuff you include can immediately be identified as eyerollingly incorrect, that's when I begin to get stomach aches. Wolfgang Pauli summed up their premise well, "That's not right. That's not even wrong." Instead the filmmaker has spent research on figuring out what the smurfs were all about. Excuse me for rolling my eyes.
The director could have gone with struggling with Darko's mental instability. No, instead he tries to paint a hero in a world that's full of idiots who can't save themselves.
It's a painful movie to watch. On more than one occasion I simply wanted to throttle everyone involved in the production. If you want to be annoyed, then watch this movie.