Donnie Darko might be the most personally influential piece of media I have ever absorbed. However much a single piece of media can inf🌳orm your tastes more than anything else, Donnie Darko was that for me. As the film turns 20, it’s time to look back on its impressive legacy, and celebrate how influential, how brilliant, and how weird Richard Kelly’s 2001 classic still🐈 is today.
I don’t think it was as influential on the wider world as it was on me person💝ally, but I still believe its greatness is somewhat objective. I𝐆t launched Jake Gyllenhaal’s career, gave rise to a more grounded type of sci-fi cinema, and its narrative, themes, and general aesthetic still hold up today.
Donnie Darko began - or at the very least, got in on the ground floor of - one of the biggest sci-fi trends of the early 21st Century. It’s not so much a sci-fi movie as it is a movie that features science fiction. It’s a fairly standard drama about a weird kid and his strange little town, except the world is going to end and a giant rabbit is haunting him with odd visions. Most of it is just a fairly normal ‘80s teen story; he gets in trouble at school, he fights with his sister, he argues about Smurfette’s fuckability (Donnie being anti-fucking-Smurfette𝓡)... you know, the usual.
In the actual ‘80s, when the film is set, there was a plethora of films leaning into science fiction elements. Blade Runner, Total Recall, Tron, Short Circuit, Flight of the Navigator, Back to the Future, Escape From New York - they are all sci-fi movies in a way Donnie Darko is not. Following Donnie Darko, we had The Machinist, The Butterfly Effect, District 9, Frank & Robot, 28 Days Later, and Signs. The more Blade Runner-style flicks, like Equilibrium, were on their way out. Of course, Requiem for a Dream, Memento, and arguably even 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Matrix arrived around the same time as Darko, and it’s a case of a changing trend more than everyone copying Darko specifically, but none of those films nailed the formula as well as Donnie Darko did. Even The Matrix, for all its legacy, leans further into classic sci-fi, anime, wuxia, ꦓand hardboiled noir than the grounded sense of the mundane of Donnie Darko.
Even movies that needed to lean into being sci-fi because of their obviously scientifically fictitious setting opted for a more realist approach. Cinema as a whole was moving towards that, but Donnie Darko, as one of the first to do it so successfully, deserves a share of the credit. While neither Sunshine nor Moon - both actively sci-fi movies that still manage to ground themselves more than Total R🐻ecall or Tron - were directly influenced by Donnie Darko, the line between them, much like the line Frank draws between Donnie and his destiny, is indelible.
I don’t think it’s too big of a stretch to say it influenced X-Men, a far more grounded and character-driven superhero flick than the typical comic book fodder of the 20th Century - and I think, in turn, it’s easy to see X-Men’s influence on Nolan’s Batman, the MCU, and the DCEU. The MCU might be the biggest cultural touchstone of the 21st Century, and it looks very different without Donnie Darko toppl💖ing the first domino.
Even in horror, sci-fi’s cinematic cousin, we see fragments of this. In the aftermath of Donnie Darko, horror was still going through its Blair Witch found footage phase, merging it with torture porn as Saw became a parody of itself and everyone decided to copy the parody. These days though, horror has refound its centre through more realistic horror films, like It (many of the book’s magical elements were removed along with that scene we shall never speak of again), Get Out, Split, Hereditary, and Midsommar. You could argue The Witch had a similar impact on horror to💮 Donnie Darko on sci-fi, but I’d be more likely to posit that The Witch understood changing trends in wider cinema and applied them to horror - trends that were set in motion, in part, by Do🐬nnie Darko.
For me personally, Donnie Darko was all about timing. It’s not my favourite movie of all time - both Lost in Translation and Fight Club edge it at least - but I don’t think anything shaped how Iও approach movies like Donnie Darko did. I don’t think anything shaped how I approach media like Donnie Darko did. Given the job I have, games obviously made up a significant portion of my childhood media consumption, but I don’t think endlessly replaying Pokemon Yellow or Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped impacted anything much beyond sore thumbs and late bedtimes.
It wasn’t until much later, when I played the likes of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Mass Effect, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Life is Strange, and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Red Dead Redemption that gaming began to have that same impact. Donnie Darko released in 2001, but it wasn’t until a couple of years later when it was given away for free in a newspaper that I saw it. Much like the portals in the movie, it felt like an avenue to another time, another p🌱lace. Donnie Darko’s legacy reaches forward and backwards. As well as setting the stage for The Machinist and The Butterfly Effect, it affected films before it - I personally might never have discovered Seven, The X-Files, or Twelve Monkeys without it.
It’s difficult to keep an objective viewpoint when it comes to Donnie Darko. Its legacy is far greater than the fact it convinced me to watch Twelve Monkeys, but I take comfort in the fact that everyone has a Donnie Darko. It might not be Donnie Darko, it might not even be a movie, but everyone has that piece of media that shaped them. I canꦦ’t separate Donnie Darko’s mark on cinema, as far reaching as I think it is, from the fact that without it I would view media through a very different lens. But separate it I must, because as Darko turns 20, it’s one of the most impressive sci-fi movies ever not because I saw it as the perfect time in my life, and not even because I adore it, but because it redirected the sci-fi genre in a way it still isn&rs𝕴quo;t getting credit for.