Philip K. Dick is Hollywood’s go-to dystopian. His eerily prescient, vaguely hallucinatory rantings have made the studios a lot of money, and sometimes even been turned into worthy films. This track record leads me to believe that there’s something at the core of Dick’s work that resonates with people, that turns them on and makes a good yarn.
It’s also why I don’t understand why directors keep trying to turn his stories into Grey’s Anatomy.
To be clear, I understand why they would do it once. You would do it once because you’re greedy, and fearful that without adding a gratuitous love story you won’t attract a large enough audience. You might think it’s worth betraying the source text for a better opening weekend, and it might be much easier to get greenlighted if you have a bankable romantic pairing attached. What I don’t understand is why you would keep doing it after that strategy fails, both artistically and commercially.
Science fiction, when done well, is about novel ideas. Good sci-fi illuminates our condition by letting us see it from a wildly unfamiliar angle, and by challenging our deepest assumptions. By contrast, Romance as a genre is about telling the same comforting story over and over. Romance reassures us that love is real, meaningful and inevitably triumphant.
The difference between these genres is the difference between “What if?” and “Happily ever after.”
The Dick story this movie is based on is a rumination on free will that imagines a team of shadowy figures who shape the world in order to shape destiny. It is not about how if you really, really like a girl then even the gods must bow to your wishes. The Dick story isn’t about that, but the movie pretty much is.
Emily Blunt and Matt Damon have nice chemistry. The gentlemen of the Adjustment bureau are exceedingly dapper. The cinematography and effects are impressive and there are fedoras with supernatural powers. Maybe that should be enough, but I couldn’t get past how deeply and cynically the marketing people had perverted the story to turn this into a dystopian date movie.
A lot of people won’t care that it’s sappy and tepid. They won’t mind the surprising amount of this film dedicated to Matt Damon running in and out of doors a la Scooby Doo. They probably won’t even notice that the entire question of free will vs. fate is subsumed into a poorly developed romance. If they don’t notice those things, they may enjoy it.
I noticed, and thus could not. That said, bravo for magic hats.
