Having not read the book, my knowledge about this was pretty zilcho except that I knew that it's a 2006 film adaptation of a semi-autobiographical drug story by Philip K Dick set in the near distant future (1994 when the book was written in the 70s, correct me if I'm wrong here).

Richard Linklater who has been making teenage cult movies like Slacker, Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise/Sunset and Suburbia, none of which I liked incidentally, is at the helm here. He uses the same Rotoscope technology as in his previous movie Waking Life (which again, I admittedly am not a fan of). The idea basically was to shoot digitally and then use the Rotoshop software to trace the live action and give it an animated look, hence preserving all the elements of live action and giving it an animated look too. He has rounded things off roping in popular actors like Keanu Reeves, Winona Ryder and Robert Downey Jr to play the lead roles.

Over to the gist of what this is about for the uninitiated, this happens 7 years from now when the whole drug scene has gone out of  the government's hands especially with this mysterious Substance D in the picture. The government, as a result of this, has reverted to highly intrusive surveillance systems to track things down. Keanu Reeves, who has a very junkie-poor-man's look, is assigned to go undercover to a house full of washed up addicts. His identity is kept secret even within the organization where he wears a Scramble Cloak which changes his voice and displays a different appearance every nanosecond or so. He even reports to this person who wears the same cloak too.

The first half of the movie is spent with funny druggie conversations and mainly Robert Downey Jr's irritating paranoid blabber (warning: this is going to be very difficult to follow unless there's complete silence while watching the movie). There are a couple of good chuckles during all this and Reeves takes the Substance D to belong in the crowd which slowly takes over him. It affects the left brain functionality and has the right brain fill in resulting in lots of hallucinations which these people can't separate from reality. Keanu begins to watch the surveillance clips of himself and he's having difficulties separating these two lives of his.

That's pretty much that needs to be told as far as the plot is concerned.

There isn't much science fiction going on here except the surveillance and the cloak bits - just to warn.

Most of the story gets told and twists unveiled in the last few minutes of the movie and it's almost well worth sitting through all the drugged out conversations (that I really didn't and don't enjoy).

It's a satisfactory and a better-than-expected watch considering the director's track record which he continued even after this film with Fast Food Nation. I'll give it 3 Thadiyans out of a possible 5.