Fixing the God Machine

I anticipated finding Donnie Darko: The Director’s Cut a lesser film than its forebear; I thought writer/director Richard Kelly would use it mostly as an opportunity to try to explicate his impenetrable plot, and to impose his reading on a text that had been ambiguous to the point of beautiful inscrutability. And that’s exactly what he does. Here’s the funny thing: I liked this version nearly as much as the theatrical cut, but for very different reasons.