This film is famous for its head-exploding scene, but that fact may hurt it more than help, at least in retrospect. The scene occurs early in the film, and for all its conceptual beauty, the execution is technically sloppy--surprising, particularly since this is a David Cronenberg film. I'm a fan of most of Cronenberg's work, but in my eyes, Scanners is one of his big mistakes, albeit one that is oddly overrated by genre fans. But the primary reason the infamous scene hurts the film is that little else happens like it again, at least not until the very end, about an hour and a half later. For most of its running time, Scanners is very dated, oddly non-atmospheric, convoluted and ultimately boring low-budget science fiction dreck.
It takes place in an alternate universe where an experimental drug has turned a number of people into telepaths who also can tap into psychokinesis when it comes to other humans' bodies and minds. There are a number of problems with this. The primary one is that Cronenberg, who also wrote the story and script, just plops us into the middle of a jargony world, with ominous government organizations, but with little backstory or explanation.
Another problem with the premise is that a lot of the conflict involves people thinking dangerous things/doing ill will via thinking. It's a problem because thinking is something that we cannot observe or experience in others (except for scanners, none of whom will be watching the film). So what we're left with is watching scanners and their victims grimace in various ways, which end up looking like a combination of constipation, sexual ecstasy, and someone in the midst of a heart attack. Sans context--and we're not usually given enough context, that's not exactly fodder for dramatic tension; it more often has the effect of unintentional humor.
There are also problems with the casting. Stephen Lack, who ends up being the protagonist, is oddly aloof and disengaging. He has all the charisma of the bare, clinically lit sets. Michael Ironside, as the chief antagonist, is better, but he's absent from the film for long periods of time, and he occasionally launches into bits of ridiculous overacting--maybe in an attempt to balance Lack's Mister Rogers-like drone. The rest of the cast is okay, but they're given mostly empty but ridiculous things to say.
Unintentional humor will also creep up at this point in time with the science aspects of the film's science fiction. The computer subplot and the machinations/physics surrounding it are absurd (as they were in 1980, but most people were far less familiar with computers then), and the mention that the computer has a "nervous system" made me lament that Cronenberg didn't instead develop something like the game console from his superior film eXistenZ (1999).
Cronenberg tries to spice things up with a few gun violence scenes and car chases/stunts, sometimes with thriller accoutrements. These scenes probably work better than any of the other material, but they're also very pedestrian, and feel like what they are--an attempt to wake the audience up from encroaching slumber.
It takes place in an alternate universe where an experimental drug has turned a number of people into telepaths who also can tap into psychokinesis when it comes to other humans' bodies and minds. There are a number of problems with this. The primary one is that Cronenberg, who also wrote the story and script, just plops us into the middle of a jargony world, with ominous government organizations, but with little backstory or explanation.
Another problem with the premise is that a lot of the conflict involves people thinking dangerous things/doing ill will via thinking. It's a problem because thinking is something that we cannot observe or experience in others (except for scanners, none of whom will be watching the film). So what we're left with is watching scanners and their victims grimace in various ways, which end up looking like a combination of constipation, sexual ecstasy, and someone in the midst of a heart attack. Sans context--and we're not usually given enough context, that's not exactly fodder for dramatic tension; it more often has the effect of unintentional humor.
There are also problems with the casting. Stephen Lack, who ends up being the protagonist, is oddly aloof and disengaging. He has all the charisma of the bare, clinically lit sets. Michael Ironside, as the chief antagonist, is better, but he's absent from the film for long periods of time, and he occasionally launches into bits of ridiculous overacting--maybe in an attempt to balance Lack's Mister Rogers-like drone. The rest of the cast is okay, but they're given mostly empty but ridiculous things to say.
Unintentional humor will also creep up at this point in time with the science aspects of the film's science fiction. The computer subplot and the machinations/physics surrounding it are absurd (as they were in 1980, but most people were far less familiar with computers then), and the mention that the computer has a "nervous system" made me lament that Cronenberg didn't instead develop something like the game console from his superior film eXistenZ (1999).
Cronenberg tries to spice things up with a few gun violence scenes and car chases/stunts, sometimes with thriller accoutrements. These scenes probably work better than any of the other material, but they're also very pedestrian, and feel like what they are--an attempt to wake the audience up from encroaching slumber.