Surely BladeRunner also has a romance at it's heart, that between Deckard and Rachel? It's that romance transcending the possible/probable/actual identities of the participants that parallels Roy Batty's message that individuals should be respected and valued regardless of their origins.

The trouble with saying The Adjustment Bureau is like 'Bourne meets Inception' is that they are action films and The Adjustment Bureau isn't.



In fact I really struggled to see any similarity between the films at all. Okay so it deals with a character being forced to question their view of reality, so I guess you can see a link with Inception, albeit a very tenuous one. However not as tenuous as the link with the Bourne films, which as far as I can tell seems to be solely down to the fact that the both star Matt Damon. You might as well say 'it's like Yes Man' since both The Adjustment Bureau and Yes Man have a scene where Terrence Stamp gives the protagonist advice on how he should live his life.

^^

I think the 'Bourne meets Inception' is marketing speak - regardless of what it is/isnt.



I like bourne. I like Inception, ergo, I am likely to like this.

The trouble with saying The Adjustment Bureau is like 'Bourne meets Inception' is that they are action films and The Adjustment Bureau isn't.



Of course it’s just marketing speak; just as Green Zone was sold as ‘Bourne Goes to War’. (I’m surprised True Grit wasn’t sold as ‘Bourne Rides a Horse’!) The trailer for Adjustment Bureau seems to be pushing a different ‘love conquers all’ line.



Adjustment Bureau is another Philip K Dick (Blade Runner, Minority Report etc) adaptation and therefore likely to be hard to define. The studio also didn’t have a clue how to market Blade Runner on its first release; I wouldn’t describe BR as an action movie either, despite it having some action scenes.

I'm a massive Philip K Dick fan, a moderate Matt Damon fan and am pretty ambivalent towards Emily Blunt.



Chances are I will like this film to some degree.



What other PKD books should they make into films? I think Flow My Tears is probably the easiest in terms of plot development and also Ubik. I'd love to see someone try Valis though.

I love that fact that Mark always thinks that most people will have read X or Y, maybe everyone who went to uni (with Mark). 30% of the adult population have no qualifications - this often leads to no interest in reading for pleasure.



There are millions of books out there, maybe we just read something else instead?

Like Mayo, I have never read any Phillip K Dick but unlike Mayo I'm not ashamed of that (although I would be ashamed of spelling dilemma incorrectly for decades without ever figuring it out). My knowledge of Phillip K Dick comes from films like Total Recall, Minority Report and of course, Blade Runner. So that's the quality of film I thought I was going to get.



I couldn't believe that the source material from Adjustment Bureau came from the same author whose work inspired those other films. I went back to read a synopsis of "Adjustment Team"(1954) and was relieved to find it bore very little resemblance to this turkey of a movie. Not even Matt Damon can save it although it's a brave attempt.



*** Spoiler ***



What absolute rubbish. Non-mortals whose powers relied on them wearing hats and staying away from water and turning the door knob the right way when going through portals? Utter Tosh! The Free Will thing doesn't work at all. It's as if Terence Stamp is making up this stuff as he goes along. There was a plan and then there was a mistake but the mistake was like the plan before it got changed and, and ... snore.



Since I have not read the books, I was not so alert to the "trust no-one" motif that Mark Kermode seems to project onto everything including Emily Blunt's character. At no point do I think Mat Damon's character is suspicious of Emily Blunt, therefore I would just have said "she is in the men's room because she is hiding

from the building's security guards" and add, if the impertinent Mayo insisted on knowing why they were chasing her, "because she crashed a wedding".



*** Spoiler End ***

I haven't seen ADJUSTMENT BUREAU, but I think it should be noted that almost none of the films based on the work of Philip K. Dick (one "l") REMOTELY resembles his books. The few that do have a close kinship to the books are SCANNER DARKLY (it's not nearly as good as the book, but it does get close in tone) and BARJO (French movie from 1992).



I once wrote about a minor book of his suggesting that behind all the aliens and spaceships, which he described without any detail or interest, most of PKD's body of work is simply about a small man who struggles to find meaning to his life. If you look past the science fiction sheen his books have, there are many extremely sharp observations about human nature, relationships, and how people and society interact.



The book DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP has very little to do with the film BLADE RUNNER. PKD's novel is peculiar, idiosyncratic to a fault, and it veers off into problematic religious issues. I very much like both BLADE RUNNER and TOTAL RECALL, but they are not representative of PKD's work.



Try reading SCANNER DARKLY, or THE TRANSMIGRATION OF TIMOTHY ARCHER if you're interested in the more literary end of his output. UBIK, or FLOW MY TEARS THE POLICEMAN SAID if you like pulpy reality bending exuberance.



Sorry for the long explication. PKD gets easily associated with the films loosely based off his work, which diminishes his peculiar brand of brilliance. And this may be bit personal too since I have PKD to thank for finding the love of my life.

For me this film lacks that certain something which results in it being an average and easily forgettable film. The relationship is nice to watch, but everything that goes with that is just a bit rubbish. It is a film that could have been a lot more but fell short quite early on.

Now that's interesting. Kermode says the film is silly, bright, heavily signposted, popcorn fun, but works as there are two people you care for at its centre. Inception had an entire cast of expositors NO ONE could care for, yet was his Film of the Year. (Though if you had that Marion Cotillard performance in a proper relationship drama, she could've won another Oscar.) Point is, if it's driven by actual human beings and not just Nolanesque avatars, I'll probably like this a hell of a lot more.

A further point : I thought a better reference many people seem to have missed is actually The Truman Show, not just because of the Big Brother/conspiring universe aspect, but because that film even features a fairly significant eloping romance component via Natascha McElhone's character. Just saying.

I have not yet seen the film yet, however upon seeing the trailer I got a terrible sinking feeling that it was going to be 'The Box: Pt II', spiritual sequel to the horribly disappointing film directed by Richard Kelly that came out a couple of years ago.

I so desperately wanted The Box to be good, and similarly want The Adjustment Bureau to be good as I am a sucker for strange creepy conspiracy theory sci-fi type thing, but I am always a bit hesitant whenever Hollywood gets their mits on short stories and makes them into full-length features.

They invariably end up feeling padded and dull.



Also, Philip K Dick has, in my opinion, been staggeringly ill-served by the film industry. Even Blade Runner 'missed the point' as an adaptation, despite being a great film on its own merits.

People will insist on turning his 4th-wall breaking narrative-discarding psychotropic stories into action films when really they and his themes are much more suited to a kind of dark, creeping unease found in Persona, Spider and the recent Black Swan.



The reason they are now plundering his short story backlog is because it would be impossible to give this action movie treatment to his brilliant novels like 'The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch', 'Ubik' and 'Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said'. In fact they come as close to be unadaptable as a novel can be, and as a film-maker myself I know enough to leave them well alone.



Right; smug sanctimonious rant over. I'm going to go and see The Adjustment Bureau anyway, like the massive hypocrite I am.

It might be fun, but it's also scarily reminiscent of DARK CITY. Which was much better, by the way.

@ spektijim



"I am always a bit hesitant whenever Hollywood gets their mits on short stories and makes them into full-length features. They invariably end up feeling padded and dull."



There's a good question for the Kermode Uncut blog - The Best and Worst Hollywood Adaptation of a Short Story. (The Good Doctor has already made his feelings on Benjamin Button quite clear. All About Eve wasn't too shabby though.)

I went to see this last night, along with my wife and two other friends. All of us were immensely disappointed.



*SPOILER*



I know that Dr K. has a liking for the film, however I felt that it was extremely flimsy. Its greatest weakness is that it lacked any tension whatsoever. After about 30 minutes it was clear that the "men in hats" were not threatening, whilst the Christian undertone was tiring. I didn't have much faith in them after it was clear that they were bamboozled by the rain! Are they angels? Is terence Stamp God? I didn't care.



Blunt was as engaging as ever and Damon was his useful sturdy self, however one senses that this got made because of star power. Beautifully shot by john Toll and with some nice subtle effects but all the tension leaked away early on leaving a fluffy romance that I couldn't care less about.



Inception meets The Bourne Identity? No. Clunking challenge to the Trades Description Act? Yes!

Have yet to see this movie. Trailer looked interesting, but I'm not expecting anything earth-shatteringly exciting about it.



Looks an interesting sci-fi/thriller/romcom. Got to love the men in the hats though ;-D.

Okay, well I've seen it. (Some slight spoilers ahead, nothing Crying Game though.)



Um, there are enough good things there to recommend it, principally the writing and delivery of the dialogue between Matt Damon and Emily Blunt which, I think, is a notch above your average Hollywood romance fare. I found them both quite charming together but then I could watch Matt Damon in just about anything, and Emily Blunt is about as inviting as someone who expresses themselves through the medium of dance can possibly be. A good amount of it is devoted to small talk minutiae like phones not working, and dress sense, which I did enjoy a lot more than the 'Let's talk about fate!' speechifying. The three characters - Norris, Elise and a rainy, overcast New York are all shot fairly nicely.



But the main problem is what is supposed to be that other main character - the eponymous antagonist. While I don't see anything intrinsically wrong about doing a light hearted interpretation of a Philip K Dick story - and this sure is the sunniest one I've ever seen - in order for the stakes of the romance to be high enough, The Adjustment Bureau need to be a lot more threatening and dangerous. Terence Stamp is his usual solid, ominous screen presence (and incidentally gets one of the better big speeches about how societies left to their own devices cause endless suffering) but Anthony Mackie's character remains positively jokey throughout with no one providing any gear shift into truly sinister that the film clearly requires. There's a slight jump moment half way through the film where the opportunity could've been taken to kill a civilian but when the worst the enemies in your film can do is sprain your ankle and make your head bleed a bit, that just doesn't cut the mustard.



Other flaws include : a bit of a lull in the middle portion; the dash across New York isn't as epic as it should be for a movie with this budget and crowdpleasing ambitions (they could learn a thing or two from Richard Curtis, who really knows how to run for that end zone with relatively little money); and I get the feeling that they were so overjoyed securing Thomas Newman as composer they decided to squeeze every last piece of material out of him, because boy did it feel like there was a lot of score in this film. But apart from the shortcoming of the villains, the only other glaring problem is the ending which lets off 'The Chairman' very lightly indeed. Given how much misery his plans have caused, making him do an "Oh shucks, go on then!" about-turn is unsatisfactory. If there's anything cinematically unappealing about a supposedly benevolent dictator, it's one without the courage of His convictions. What you really need is Alan Rickman turning up at the end screaming, "I'll cut your heart out with a spoon!". Failing that, it would've been more interesting to pursue the theme that The Adjustment Bureau aren't necessarily wrong in weighing up the greater good, because by spoiling one relationship, they'll may actually allow Norris to affect real political change and positively affect the lives of millions of others. But then you don't really see much of Norris's politics at all. A braver film - one written by Damon himself, a staunch liberal Democrat, and Palin hater - would've probably explored these issues more fully, like how badly the public needs a new leader and how much damage the policies of the elder statesman - 'The Tool' - have caused to the people in his hometown. Then you would have had a real conflict between the private lives of one couple versus the everyday lives of a large population.



But you're not really supposed to criticise a film for what's it's not, so what it is, is a nice, low key romance, that doesn't really qualify as science fiction, but is more of a straight fantasy drama, thanks to the wise lack of turgid technical exposition. As I guessed beforehand it has better characters than Inception (simply by default since they talk about motivations other than plot). What it doesn't have is Inception's plot - tricky, engaging and unpredictable throughout its entire runtime, always double-backing on itself - so alas as overrated as it was, I don't like it as much as that film. But just like Marion Cotillard's Mal, if you threw Norris and Elise into a straight character drama, and dropped the fantasy stuff, I suspect you may very well end up with a better overall movie.



6/10.

A correction to my quasi-review : I refer to an 'Anthony Mackie' as the jokey one. This is wrong. The jokey one is John Slattery. Mackie couldn't be more depressing in this if he tried. Even as an 'angel' I think he was still worried about featuring in The Chairman's tried and tested plan of 'Dead Black Guy'.

i really did enjoy this for many of the reasons the good doctor mentioned but kept getting a feeling of deja vu... angels make a mistake that results in a romance that wasnt meant to happen happening... one side arguing that as there is a plan that is stuck to that the romance cannot continue.... those never ending stairs going up the way....it got me thinking about all the similarities to another of my favourite schmoltzy films(ok no court room scene but..).... a matter of life and death with david niven.

the film should be given a swift burial and left to DVD

KERMODE



I have utmost respect for you and your taste in film, which reflects my own so often and in this review I felt I read the film in the same way you did and your feelings on it echoed my own; this is good, since I've had to defend my liking of it to every other person I talk to about it.



What I want to say though, is on your comment when talking about the film being compared to Inception. You say Inception lite, fair enough. You go on to say Inception is for everyone.



This got me thinking about yours and Mayo's rules for the cinema, from a few months back. A list I agreed with mostly. What really got me mad, was your implication that parents use 12A as a form of bypassing a babysitter, by taking youngsters to the cinema.



I have taken my boys to several 12A rated films, not once has it had anything to do with not being able to get rid of them. It's been because the films I felt were quite likely ones that we could connect with together.



Your opinion that Inception is for everyone, which I agree with, flies in the face of your rule. A rule which is frankly wrong in many respects, considering the Potter films can't possibly be considered as more for adults than children - my opinion.



Of course, I know your rules were lighthearted anyway, so it's no big deal.

I was so surprised by just how much I enjoyed this movie. Reviews have been so-so, including your own Dr K, so I wasn't expecting much when I went in.

What I saw was one of the best romantic dramas that I have seen in a long time. Yes, at its heart it is a romance, the scifi element is just an aside a means of telling the story. One could get wrapped up in the God/free will/fate theme but it's really not that important, at least not in this cinematic representation of the Philip K Dick story.

Matt Damon and Emily Blunt have real chemistry togther onscreen and a free and easy approach to the delivery of their lines. At times it felt like watching a Woody Allen romantic comedy, with that adlib feel that gives his films such a naturalistic tone. I truly believed that David (Damon) and Elise (Blunt) were falling for each other and that David would (to quote Meatloaf) do anything for love.

It isn't deep and intense like the wonderful Blade Runner or in your face like the OTT Total Recall (which I still love for all its faults) it's a simple love story that just so happens to have a scifi element. Yet for all it's simplicity I was carried away by the plot, and fell for the characters, willing them to win. Definitely worth a watch.

"Bourne meets Inception"? nope... "Dark City meets Vanilla Sky"? yes!

I'm interested to learn more about George Nolfi who directed, wrote the screenplay and co-produced this film. I got the feeling while watching it that it a carefully put-together movie: I liked the dialogue, it felt like it had a heart to it, the choices and issues presented by the concept of the movie (irrespective of the clothing ie suits & hats of stangely beauracratic looking men) felt like the sort of real concerns that anyone might consider about their life albeit this movie portrayed it in way familiar and yet unreal at the same time; perhaps personified by those strangely garbed men? Putting a human face on such things is not an unusual device afterall.



I think reading some of the above comments, my impression and opinion is that a lot of people expected thrills and spills from mysterious strangers hooded under wide-brimmed hats and swathy trenchcoats, whereas the ideal of these was more along the lines of shadowy observers just out of sight. In fact I'll back that description up with the fact that the *(spoiler)* chase-scene was the only low point of the movie for me and felt flat and too much like the dead-end Inception fell into for almost all of that movie of the action taking precedence over the idea and/or senssation of that idea. Hmm, not sure how well I conveyed that, but apt comparison given so many people have tried to pidgeon-hole this move alongside that movie and come up with an odd taste!



Solid movie and refreshing to see a romance/split-lovers story in the caught up in events and machinations greater and beyond their understandings: Do you trust your head or your heart and what are the consequences? 4*