Donnie Darko (2001) – A Science Fiction Movie Review

Continuing my review of a list of “best Science fiction movies” from YouTube, the next installment is a movie from 2001 that I have heard spoken of as a “forgotten gem;” Donnie Darko.  I will attempt to disavow my audience of that idea.

(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)

I would compare this movie to some mash-up of “The Breakfast Club” with a cheapo time travel/horror movie.  The movie is stewed in teenage angst in an upscale California town where Donnie Darko (played by a young Jake Gyllenhaal) is undergoing psychotherapy to find out why he is hallucinating about a man in a dog mask who seems to be telling him to do dangerous and harmful things like smashing a water main to flood out his high school and burn down the house of a motivational speaker who is appearing at the school’s Health classes.

While staying out all night at the urging of Frank (the dog guy) Donnie escapes death when an airliner engine falls out of the sky and destroys his bedroom.  It turns out that the FAA can’t locate a plane that lost an engine that day.  Meanwhile his science teacher answers questions about time travel by using Stephen Hawking’s theories about wormholes to justify Donnie’s belief that his psychosis is really messages being sent to him from time travelers.  And when he finds out that an old woman who lives up in the hills was a teacher at his school who wrote a book about time-travel he becomes convinced that he will be involved in a time travel event.

It all comes to a head around Halloween so the fact that some of the kids in the movie are wearing masks becomes less inexplicable but no less annoying.  By the end of the movie several people have been killed violently which appears to include his mother and younger sister who are aboard a jet airliner that coincidently has lost an engine over his town before landing.

At that point, Donnie goes up to the mountains to await the time-traveling storm that’s about to strike.  The end of the movie returns back a month before all the trouble started and this time Donnie is in the room when the engine strikes.  So apparently, he’s sacrificed himself to prevent the deaths of his mother and sister and his girlfriend and the guy who ran her over and was then shot to death by Donnie.  The end.

I hated this movie so much I can’t state it enough.  I despised everyone in it.  That includes Donnie, his English teacher (played by Drew Barrymore), his mother (played by the actress who was the president’s wife in Independence Day), the motivational speaker who turned out to be a kiddie porn purveyor (played by Patrick Swayze), and basically everyone else in the movie.  Everything about this movie was annoying or depressing.  And calling it science fiction is absurd.  There’s absolutely no justification given for any of the events or hallucinations that Donnie experienced.  But honestly, he was such an unlikeable character that all I felt at the end of the movie was annoyance that I had sat through this ridiculous movie.  I don’t recommend this movie to any fans of science fiction.