A Lot of People Love This Movie, I Didn't

Rating: 4/10 (1 April 2009)

For years I kept hearing "You have to see Donnie Darko" and "I can't believe you haven't seen Donnie Darko". It kept coming up on my list of recommendations at Amazon.com and on Netflix. Well, I finally sat down to watch it last night and fell asleep. So this evening, I sat down to watch the rest of the film.
Why? Because I bought into all of the hype surrounding Donnie Darko. That it was a movie that you cannot just watch the first hour of and walk away, that the payoff in the second hour makes the whole thing worth it.
Don't buy into that. If you're watching this film and you just don't like it after the first 30 minutes, don't waste your time on the rest of the movie, it's just not for you. It certainly wasn't for me.
However, I can see how some people might find this movie fascinating and riveting. It didn't do anything for me.
The story is fairly straight forward, albeit from a slightly unnerving point of view. In many ways the way this film was shot was a sort of tribute to the way that Donnie experiences his world.
The Soundtrack was a great amalgam of late 80's pop that anyone growing up at the time will identify with. However, the emotions that are experienced and the scenes just seemed overly contrived and at time farcical. There was little flow to this film. In it's attempts to be hip and cutting edge, it distracted the viewer just enough as to disengage him or her from the film.
I couldn't identify with any of the characters in the film simply because they were all over characterizations. The brooding Teen, the bully, the preppy girl, none of them seemed at all believable, and in a story such as this, believability is what would drive the viewer to engage in the characters and their actions.
This film is certainly not for anyone, and I think, really, the emotional investiture that's necessary to draw the viewer in was lost on me.