This fun movie will make you think but it has enough clues for you to figure it out

Rating: 9/10 (28 April 2006)

I have just watched Donnie Darko. I must have watched parts of it half-asleep on a red-eye flight, because I had this funny deja-vu feeling about lots of scenes. This only helped the effect of the movie, as you can imagine. I offer below my own personal interpretation of this quirky movie.
In my opinion, this movie definitely has a messianic theme. If you notice when Donnie is leaving the movie theater, we can see that "The Last Temptation of Christ" is showing in that cinema. Why is that important? Because in that movie and book by Kazantzankis, there is also a time-loop involved, after Christ avoids death on the cross and goes on to have a normal life. The result is complete chaos, after which Christ goes back in time and dies on the cross, thereby sparing the world from destruction. Just like in "Donnie Darko." (Edit: this messianic role is reinforced when Donnie's girlfriend say that his name sounds like a super-hero name). In "The Last Temptation of Christ," it is also open to interpretation if Christ really climbed down from the cross, or if everything was just a vision, a last temptation. Again, just like in "Donnie Darko." By dying in the freak accident, Donnie saves the world. (Edit: There's a thread on this interpretation running on the Donnie Darko IMDb Board, previous to this comment, at http://imdb.com/title/tt0246578/board/thread/41699057).
Another clue is the title of the book, "Philosophy of Time Travel." It is not "Physics of Time Travel," or "How to Build a Time Machine." Time travel is never a clear-cut reality in this movie, instead, it's the philosophy behind it that is important. Are we in control of our destiny? Do we have true free-will or is everything pre-determined? Another clue for this is the opening song, "The Killing Moon," by Echo and Bunnymen. If you listen to the chorus of that song, that's exactly this theme it addresses (If by "he", you interpret "fate").
A somewhat similar quirky movie with philosophical undertones is "Being John Malkovich". I wish there were more of these types of movies, they are great fun and thought-provoking.