Continuing my review of a list of \u201cbest Science fiction movies\u201d from YouTube, the next installment is a movie from 2001 that I have heard spoken of as a \u201cforgotten gem;\u201d Donnie Darko.\u00a0 I will attempt to disavow my audience of that idea.<\/p>\n
(Spoiler Alert \u2013 Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)<\/strong><\/p>\n I would compare this movie to some mash-up of \u201cThe Breakfast Club\u201d with a cheapo time travel\/horror movie.\u00a0 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\u2019s Health classes.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 It turns out that the FAA can\u2019t locate a plane that lost an engine that day.\u00a0 Meanwhile his science teacher answers questions about time travel by using Stephen Hawking\u2019s theories about wormholes to justify Donnie\u2019s belief that his psychosis is really messages being sent to him from time travelers.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n At that point, Donnie goes up to the mountains to await the time-traveling storm that\u2019s about to strike.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 So apparently, he\u2019s 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.\u00a0 The end.<\/p>\n I hated this movie so much I can\u2019t state it enough.\u00a0 I despised everyone in it.\u00a0 That includes Donnie, his English teacher (played by Drew Barrymore), his mother (played by the actress who was the president\u2019s 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.\u00a0 Everything about this movie was annoying or depressing.\u00a0 And calling it science fiction is absurd.\u00a0 There\u2019s absolutely no justification given for any of the events or hallucinations that Donnie experienced.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I don\u2019t recommend this movie to any fans of science fiction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Continuing my review of a list of \u201cbest Science fiction movies\u201d from YouTube, the next installment is a movie from 2001 that I have heard<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[239,237,4,243],"tags":[5150,5151,43,38,1355,265],"class_list":["post-36137","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","category-reviews","category-sff","category-sff-movie-reviews","tag-donnie-darko","tag-jake-gyllenhaal","tag-movie-review","tag-review","tag-reviews","tag-science-fiction"],"yoast_head":"\n