I hated it for all of those things. Honest to heaven, I truly despised every single second that it was on my television screen.
When I watched it a few years later, however, I realized that I was very much wrong the first time round. This film really was top notch
My main problem the first time, you see, was that I hated the fact that the story wasn't providing me with any easy-to-digest answers. So many events were going on and none of them were elucidated. I seriously wanted answers from a film that was far too unwilling to deliver any.
But searching for universal explanations is not the way to watch Donnie Darko. Do not enter this film expecting to have it all clarified and explained to you. This is a movie that will throw a heap of abnormal situations at your mind and will then proceed by teasing its viewer with a whole array of hints and ideas about what might be the reason for all this seemingly nonsensical chaos.
Donnie will see wormholes in space, meet a woman nicknamed old lady time, burn down the house which reveals that its owner is in fact a pedophile, discuss the philosophy of smurfs, chin wag about the nature of time travel with a teacher from his school, make friends with an alien time bunny called Frank, survive a jet engine which mysteriously crashes into his bedroom and then even get killed by that very same jet engine.
What is suppose to be going on here? Is it time travel? Is Donnie mentally unstable? Is it a combination of both? Is it a combination of either? Whatever it may be, the narrative of this film isn't going to tell you. You're on your own baby, so you better stop asking questions and start coming up with your own solutions.
All of this makes Donnie Darko sound like a right old pain in the arse, and at times, it is. Even to this very day, I can watch it and grow angry at the entire viewing experience. I can spend hours formulating the perfect theory for the story at hand; only to either forget it entirely or have a particular scene contradict all of my coherently thought out ideas.
But then that is what makes this film work so wonderfully. The whole experience is down to whatever the viewer choices it to be. It can be an ocean of pretentious folly; a psychological thriller set inside Donnie's mind; the most complex time travel story ever told; the dumbest time travel story ever told; or even a psychedelic story about angels and Gods and what not.
The director's cut of this film sort of strips this ambiguous narrative away slightly, however, by attempting to fill in a few of the missing gaps. The more that director Richard Kelly attempts to shine some light on the mysteries of this tale, such light can end up unintentionally shining upon the flaws of the story's mechanics.
And that is were we move on to the next slight issue. The director's cut of this film makes Donnie Darko appear as though it suffers from what I like to call 'Jaws Syndrome'. This is a name taken from the Steven Spielberg classic Jaws. Upon on the release of this 1975 blockbuster, the film became a smash hit. Most of it's success was due to the incredible levels of tension that existed throughout. It scared the hell out of people, mainly because audiences were forced to use their imagination for a large chunk of the film.
Not seeing the great white shark meant that you had to use your other senses in order to recognize when the beast was approaching. It was the buildup of John Williams' now infamous scroe which gave people access to this foreknowledge. Focusing in on the soundtrack immersed viewers into the film more so than the bog standard passive viewing experience.
This is level of increased attention is also why so many foreign horror films successful capture western audience's imaginations. The fact that they have to read subtitles throughout a narrative forces them to pay extra attention to the feature in question. They have to keep a close eye on the story in order to know clearly what is going on.
This heightened attention meant that when the head of a corpse slips out from the wreckage of a sunken boat in Jaws, audiences receive the freight of their life (and wholly lord is it scary). They were listening closely, completely absorbed in the text of the film. So when that mutilated head pops onto the screen, it scares the shit out of everyone.
The lack of a shark in Jaws also meant that there were a number of information gaps in the film's narrative. In this case, they were visual gaps. Audiences were denied access to a verified image of the shark, which meant that they were forced to use their imagination in order to understand the horrors of what was happening to the victims below the surface of those killer waters. Everyone knew what a great white looked like, but imagination is a wonderful thing. It allows you to over hype and amplify the things which once may have seemed so familiar to you.
Despite the brilliance of Jaws, the grounds on which the success of this film was built upon were in actual fact a fluke. The shark was never meant to be invisible for as long as it was. The real reason was that the animatronic shark was so poorly designed that it would not work properly during earlier takes. In the end, Spielberg decided to think to hell with it and filmed most of the scenes without the visual presence of the film's core antagonist.
The shark didn't get to appear in the film until the end of act two, which mean that the opening two acts were filled with the suspension and imaginative investment that would never have been achieved if Bruce (the shark) was present from scene one.
Like Jaws, Donnie Darko's success also appears to be something of a fluke itself. The reason why the film was apparently so ambiguous was not entirely the choice of Richard Kelly. It turns out that the production of the whole thing was a something of a train wreck.
Initially, the film was meant to be more of a science fiction/superhero sub genre about a boy who was destined to save the world from a rip in the space time continuum. Yet a number of problems occurred which made the film spin into an entirely unique direction.
There are rumors that Kelly was slightly unsure on where he was going when telling the story of this film. He had no idea what to promote it as and no clues on how to tie everything up. On top of this, the film came out soon after the events of September 11th, meaning that the whole idea of a story revolving around a jet engine crashing into an American home scared the shit out of demographic fixated producers.
All kinds of stories and rumors regarding the production period of Donnie Dark suggests that the ambiguity and the cult admiration for this film were all bi-products of a production schedule which didn't go as intentionally planned.
If this is true, then this would suggest why the director's cut of the film might not work as well as the original. The theatrical version was loved for its out there narrative execution, complex story telling and huge 80s nostalgia buzz. When the director's cut attempted to push the film further into that of a fixed science fiction/time travel plot, we begin to loose some of the magic. The entire story works better in its original format; a scattered story which somehow became brilliant along the way.
Putting the director's edition aside, however, the original release of the film is truly great. It is a story set within a bubble of reality - a timeless sandbox of October 1988 - which can be reshaped and remoulded into whatever the viewer wants it to be. It can quite easily be a film about everything or a film about nothing.
To see how open and diverse Donnie Darko is, try Googling the movie. Notice all the endless number of essays and forum topics that are scattered across the world wide web. See the diversity in all the theories and claims which attempt to explain what is actually happening in this film.
Donnie Darko is a puzzle which must not only be pieced together by the viewer, but must also be designed by them as well.
Oh, and the film also has an awesome soundtrack.
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