Waking Life Review

Linklater has taken the character played by Wiley Wiggins in his early film, Dazed And Confused, and placed him in a kind of dream world in which he has a series of encounters with windy philosophers who expound some fairly trite theories about existentialism and all that stuff. The film was shot on video, with hand-held camera, edited, and then animated using a computer technique called `interpolated rotoscoping`. The question is, was it worth it?...For a while this plotless exercise in pretention fascinates; the computerised animation allows you to identify some of the actors involved, including Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke, the stars of Linklater`s Before Sunrise, and director Steven Soderbergh; but very quickly the hand held camera style with animation laid over the top of it becomes extremely irritating. OK, so it`s an unusual experiment, but what was the point of it? The endless, drivelly philosophising is the kind of boring chatter you`d run a mile from if you came across it in real life, and the need for animation escapes me. It`s just an exercise, and not a very interesting one. But, I suppose, if you want the kind of head trip that Sundance audiences apparently experienced, you could check it out.