I don't agree with this movie's message.

Rating: Null/10 (25 April 2004)

********CONTAINS SPOILERS***********
I have seen many recommendations for this movie, one from a close friend who's opinion I value, so when I saw it cheap on sale as a DVD, I bought it, thinking it was about time I gave it a go. Well, the upshot is I don't like it. That's not to say that I think it was a bad movie; certainly it was well written and competently acted and, give a sigh of relief, does not fall into the Hollywood mainstream.
So why didn't I like it? First of all, I think it's something to do with the style which writer/director Richard Kelly decided to do it. FRANK, the mysterious figure of Darko's apparent hallucinations, is dressed in a rabbit suit. This leads one to think of another famous movie with a six foot rabbit, Harvey. Certainly from reading the synopses of this movie - something like "The world is coming to an end and only Donnie Darko knows anything about it" - one might have thought that Donnie Darko falls into the same category as Harvey and other movies in which the protagonist sees things that other people can't and consequently appears to everybody else to be a madman. (Blithe Spirit (1946) is another example.) However, there is a crucial difference between Harvey and Donnie Darko. Harvey works because the audience *believes the protagonist*. However mad or drunk James Stewart acts, the audience knows that Harvey is real and that Stewart's behaviour is consistent. What we see in Donnie Darko, however, is a character set up as emotionally disturbed. He sees a mysterious character, who tells him to do things - bad things, illegal things - and Darko does them. He's responding to the "voices in his head", and the fact that we, the audience, also see Frank, does not alter the fact that we see Darko from our point of view as normal people do. The consequences of these actions reveal some evil in one case and lead to tragedy in another. At the end, however, we see Kelly resorting to what we Star Trek fans refer to as "the rewind button", and consequently we can interpret (here comes the SPOILER) the entire movie as being a paranoid delusion of Darko's. Apparently the tragic outcome no longer occurs, but then neither does the revelation of genuine evil in a character thought of by the locals as good.
What all this amounts to is that the message of this movie appears to me to be "Paranoid schizophrenics really *are* better off dead!" which I'm sure Kelly didn't intend. But because of the style where what was in Darko's head was never seen outside his head, it is the unavoidable conclusion.
As a general work of moviemaking, there are a number of flaws. Although Darko and his fellow students are described by Barrymore's teacher character as apathetic and emotionally detached, I feel the script takes emotional detachment far too much to its heart. The revelation of evil I spoke of is the discovery that Swayze's inspirational speaker is in fact a child porn merchant. But we don't remotely see what this involved (apart from a few lines about a "dungeon" in his house) and after the revelation we never even meet the character again. Then again, Kitty's defense of him occurs in one scene but has no further consequences. Kitty's character is inconsistent - she is a religiously-inclined woman who wants an innocent Graham Greene short story banned, yet she also apparently choreographed a troupe of 13-year old girls to dance in the sexiest manner possible. Is there a connection with this, her devotion to Swayze's character, and his predilections? It simply isn't explored. The character of Donnie's love interest, Gretchen Ross, isn't formed fully enough for us to be able to either empathise with her or with Donnie's fascination for her. After he asks her to "go with him" and she says yes, she doesn't appear again until after Donnie's talk with Mrs Thurman (a long-awaited reappearance from Katharine Ross, incidentally) in which he confesses his fear of dying alone. This is a fundamental structural flaw - it's almost like Kelly forgot about her in the intervening scenes.
I'm afraid that whatever concepts Kelly has of time travel indicate a woeful ignorance of the extensive literature on time travel, both by scientists and in the realm of serious science fiction, causing everything to be said by all the characters on this subject to be vapid pseudo-intellectual rubbish which didn't make the first step towards explaining the ultimate working out of the movie's plot.
Supposed stylistic elements like the use of fast cutting, hand held cameras, mixed slow and fast motion, had no contribution to make to our understanding of the story or the characters, particularly Darko, and came across as a rookie director putting those things in to attract attention to himself.