Scanners (David Cronenberg, 1981)

I’m not quite sure what to say about this film. Really, I have no idea, after the really good film The Fly, this one felt much hollower, like I was missing something. It’s hard to describe, but everything that happened in this felt like it had no purpose. I was quite looking forward to this next Cronenberg film after watching The Fly, but was left quite disappointed.

Let me tell you the plot. A bunch of people are born with fearsome mental abilities, called “Scanners”, they can “scan” other people’s thoughts, and can also blow up their heads. A government body has been surveying these people for some time, but when they get too close to one of them, they die, because apparently there’s some mastermind scanner forming a sort of cult group. But then, from nowhere, a young scanner turns up who has powers beyond any other scanner, for some reason. This chap, by the way, is played by a guy called Stephen Lack, and I’m sure a piece of cardboard would have done an adequately good acting job compared to him. Cronenberg usually have really interesting and quirky actors in his films, note Jeff Goldblum in The Fly, or James Woods in Videodrome. I don’t necessarily believe that films need good acting, or any sort of conventional acting (see Jean-Luc Godard films), but in this type of films it usually help, and Stephen Lack is truly uninspired in this, and has about the same charisma as a burnt piece of toast. There are a couple of highlights in the film, but no saving graces. But I guess I might have lost whatever point Cronenberg tried to make, maybe there was some sort of sub-text I didn’t get. There’s a great scene in the beginning of the film where the protagonist, who is a bum, goes and eats discarded food at tables in a shopping mall, and the reactions of two elderly women who look disgusted at him. He sees them, hears their thoughts, and get one of the women to have a seizure. It’s actually a quite chilling sequence, and done right, but similar scenes where the scanners use their abilities mostly turns silly.

The cinematography is interesting though, slightly offbeat but really uses colours and shapes well. The synthetic soundtrack is also good, albeit slightly cheesy at times. The thing about Scanners is that I really can’t see the bigger picture in it, in many ways it’s similar to The Fly, but at the same time The Fly felt like it had a new way of presenting something, an interesting sub-plot in a ridiculous main-plot. My experience with science is rather limited, only three years of high school, but I can still point out tons of flaws and plot-holes in The Fly, but I didn’t let it detract from the story. In Scanners however, the plot and scientific explanations are so ridiculous and silly I just couldn’t let it go. Wait, he can hack computers using his scanner abilities? Come on!

To me, The Fly was a wonderful surprise, Scanners a sad disappointment. I might re-watch it someday, but for now, I’ll let it rot in my “forgotten” pile.