Director's Cut

Rating: Null/10 (11 December 2002)

After dragging my feet for a few months, friends finally persuaded me to see this film. The descriptions were brief and somewhat misleading.
Donnie Darko is a brilliant tribute to the 80s John Hughes movies about
teenage misfits, but seen through an incredibly twisted lens. Thoughout the film the viewer is not entirely certain whether the protagonist is violently insane and heading towards a climactic bloodbath, or whether his hallucinations are in fact supernatural visions dealing with time travel. The movie is saturated with
images and music from the 80s which were incredibly funny and nostalgic, even while Donnie draws strange and delusional connections between
commonplace events which may actually be omens or messages from another
time or universe. The conclusion of the film is shocking and profound,
attempting to answer theological questions without being preachy.
I saw the film. It suddenly became one of my favorites instantly-- and I have a massive movie collection-- and I bought the DVD. Even having it on tape would be frustrating, because I knew that it would be a film to watch until the tape wore thin. It is both great filmmaking, and something which affected me very deeply.
What is revealed on the DVD through the commentary and extras is that this film had a great deal more character development and the mythology of the
supernatural explanation of the film is extremely well developed. The pacing is dramatically improved and minor loose ends are resolved. After seeing the
Fellowship of the Ring extended edition only a month ago, I am convinced that a director's cut for this movie is in order.
The cult status of this movie is growing by word of mouth, as I've experienced firsthand. And I'll bet they'd be eager to have a copy of this film shown the way it was intended, because there was clearly too much depth to be covered in two
hours. Those two hours pass by in an instant.