Donny Darko Essay

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User Comments (Comment on this title) 230 out of 421 people found the following comment useful:- Quirky film that's wide open to interpretation, 20 February 2005 Author: Brandt Sponseller from New York City Upon awakening, Donnie Darko (Jake Gyllenhaal) finds that he's been asleep in the middle of a secluded mountain road. It seems that Donnie regularly wanders out at night and sleeps in strange places. The night that he ends up on the neighborhood golf course, a stray jet engine crashes through Donnie's bedroom. He's saved by his odd behavior. Shortly after, we witness him hearing voices and having visions of an odd, evil-looking, bipedal, man-sized bunny. The voice begins giving him unusual suggestions, and Donnie slowly finds himself as the key player in a grand scheme. Donnie Darko is an unusual film. It spans a number of genres and leaves itself wide open to interpretation. Quite a cult of hardcore fans has developed around it, and for those folks, the film is essentially immune to criticism and reinterpretation. The biggest surprise to me was that the bulk of Donnie Darko is a realist drama. I had long heard about how strange the film was, and heard it described as being partially sci-fi (which it is) and horror (which it isn't if you ask me). It was supposedly a "reality-bender". I'm much more of a "genre" fan, and I much prefer fantasy, surrealism and absurdism to realism. My preconceptions were throwing me off of the film initially. The realist drama stuff seemed to drag on, and it made much of the film a hard sell. I loved the touches of weirdness, but they were too little, too far between--at least until I reached my personal interpretation of the film around the halfway mark. The film is also odd in that it's so retro. At one point I double-checked the DVD box, thinking that Donnie Darko had to be a late 1980s film. Nope, 2001.

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