Very pretentious and way over-hyped

Rating: 4/10 (15 March 2010)

It was recommended to me by a dozen people, so, going in I had high expectations. I'll admit the film was decent enough for 1 hour and 20 minutes. The plot was disjointed and meandering, with many 1-dimensional characters, but Donnie Darko himself was a likable character. Then, the last 20 or so minutes was an absolute shitstorm. It was as if the writers had thumbed through a book about time travel and decided to put it in the movie. There was nothing deep or provocative about the sci-fi plot twist; it was just dumb. It was at this point that I realized how pretentious this film was. The movie tried so hard to be deep that it ended up falling flat. The unfortunate thing about this is that, apparently, many people have mistaken the convoluted plot for something more. The film was so confusing to them that they just assumed it was deep. I originally watched the film because it was recommended to me by people in my 11th grade honors English class, people who I considered intellectuals by some definition of the word. But confusing isn't deep and something deep doesn't have to be hard to understand.