Tomorrow a new film based on a Philip K. Dick story, The Adjustment Bureau, opens. I’ve not yet seen the Matt Damon/Emily Blunt film yet, but the PKD fans I know are not impressed with it and don’t think it’s true to the author’s vision and thinks it’s been skewed too much in a conventional-romantic direction. (Here is a mostly approving review by the NYT’s Manohla Dargis.)
The film is based on a 1954 Dick short story, “Adjustment Team,” which is pretty decent for early PKD has more cinema-ready action than many; within a few pages much of the protagonist’s world has crumbled to ash and he’s chased with menacing minders — “men in white robes” — of the kind the author specialized in. Jonathan Lethem collects the piece in the 2002 Selected Stories and writes that in this story “we meet the Dick of the great sixties novels, his characters defined by how they endure more than by any triumph over circumstances.” (I’m gonna take my guess as to whether it’s the crashing action or the stolid endurance that plays a bigger role in this film version.)
Director George Nolfi seems to have his heart in the right place. “Dick was really interested in the line between reality and some mental construct that could be illusion or could be another level of existence,” Nolfi told Geoff Boucher of Hero Complex. “I really wanted to take that and turn it on its head and ask, ‘What happens if you see behind the curtain and it’s unequivocally clear that is the truth?’ What you’ve seen before is only a tiny part of reality, how do you deal with that?”
And brief news today, Friday, that Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? may inspire another movie that could be a sequel or prequel to Blade Runner.