Scanners (1981)
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Scanners Movie Review
Scanners is a 1981 Canadian science fiction horror film directed by David Cronenberg. It’s a solid and effective, but ultimately far from great genre flick.
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“You called me a scanner.
What is that?“
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This is a very reminiscent film to the director’s ‘The Dead Zone’ in its cold, dark and precise execution and genre thrills, but it’s just as flawed as that flick in my opinion. The film’s about telepathic and telekinetic-powered people and it’s obviously very entertaining in its storyline and mostly a lot of fun. But it becomes way too political in the style of political thrillers and not enough sci-fi elements are there nor is it particularly scary either. It’s mostly just gross, though effective to a degree in shocking the audiences.
I found the characters very forgettable. They aren’t bad, but they aren’t great either and none of them got the proper development for me to care about them or root for them to survive. The acting is fine though and the direction from Cronenberg is mostly pretty good.
Scanners looks great owing to its impressive usage of practical special effects that still look good to this day. It doesn’t feel dated at all and the movie uses just enough of the VFX that they never overstay their welcome. And yes, it’s gory, but still not too disgusting and those scenes definitely leave a memorable impression.
Scanners has too many of those thriller scenes with computers and politics and it needed more sophistication in it as it’s thematically not one of the director’s most intriguing works. It mostly favors style over substance as it looks and sounds really good thanks to such a good, intense and memorable score.
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I found the first third of the film the most impactful as it was still fresh and exciting whereas the rest of the film felt overly typical in plot to me and rarely particularly inventive. In the end, it’s a solidly made movie across the board, but it’s never as great as it could have been had it had more brains in it. The dialogue itself is solid too, but the movie needed more of it.
Scanners is intense, very entertaining and with a well utilized premise in it. The special effects are excellent for its time and the score is very effective. The movie’s pretty solid across the board, but it needed more sophistication in it as it ended up being just a standard sci-fi horror flick with nothing truly outstanding to offer.
