If the latest Matt Damon vehicle, “The Adjustment Bureau,” has a familiar paranoid alternate reality sensibility to it, it’s because it’s the latest rendering of a Philip K. Dick story (the ninth, to be exact) in film. Dick, it will be remembered, was the wizard behind the curtain for the stories that were eventually adapted as “Blade Runner,” “Total Recall,” “A Scanner Darkly,” “Minority Report,” and “Paycheck,” the latter starring Damon’s longtime buddy Ben Affleck.
Dick considered himself to be as much as a visionary as a teller of tales, and many of his works reflect turmoil in his personal life, including substance abuse, as well as the various political and social trends that were prevalent from the early cold war era through the Watergate period. Taken as a whole, he saw his body of work as a kind of intellectual and philosophical autobiography. You might say he’s a darker Ray Bradbury on acid.
While it’s difficult to say that any sci-fi writer is ahead of his time (after all, in most cases, that’s their stock-in-trade), in Dick’s case, it’s fair to say that the world finally caught up with him. He died prematurely in 1982, and he lived just long enough to see his cult following begin to develop.
The film stars Matt Damon, Emily Blunt, Anthony Mackie, John Slattery, Shohreh Aghdashloo, Michael Kelly and Terence Stamp. It was written and directed by George Nolfi (writer of Ocean’s Twelve, co-writer of The Bourne Ultimatum).
From the press kit:
Do we control our destiny, or do unseen forces manipulate us? Matt Damon stars in the thriller The Adjustment Bureau as a man who glimpses the future Fate has planned for him and realizes he wants something else. To get it, he must pursue the only woman he’s ever loved across, under and through the streets of modern-day New York.
On the brink of winning a seat in the U.S. Senate, ambitious politician David Norris (Damon) meets beautiful contemporary ballet dancer Elise Sellas (Emily Blunt)—a woman unlike any he’s ever known. But just as he realizes he’s falling for her, mysterious men conspire to keep the two apart.
David learns he is up against the agents of Fate itself—the men of The Adjustment Bureau—who will do everything in their considerable power to prevent David and Elise from being together. In the face of overwhelming odds, he must either let her go and accept a predetermined path…or risk everything to defy Fate and be with her.
– Universal Pictures