Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly, Paycheck and now The Adjustment Bureau, are films that I have seen based on Philip K. Dick novels or short stories. In each, the metaphysical world that the characters live in is a sci-fi-ed version of our own. Matt Damon and Emily Blunt rom-com-ed a sci-fi-ed meta-physic in this most recent installment of predestination vs. free will. The Adjustment Bureau itself is helmed by a boss that we never meet, yet this boss has two soft-spots. Boss and his 'agents' are weaker around water and seemingly confused by chance and love - two themes that play out insofar as they became one thing. It is chance and love that finally free the love birds of the confines of a plan that originally calls for separate existences. The fun is not so much in the head play of free will vs. predestination as it is the consistent escaping Damon and Blunt execute. Lucky for them, they befriend a disenfranchised agent that has become wayward in his matrix enforcement due to lack of vacation time. It his old-timey hat that allows Damon to portal from the 'planned world' to the 'real world' or the experienced world just in time to interrupt Blunt's foreseen mistake.
Damon is Damon in this move so no real surprises. Emily Blunt, however, I thought, was really good. The script doesn't make too much room for Oscar performances but it does require Damon and Blunt to be somewhat believable. After all, a rom-comed sci-fi thriller, is already enough of a play--much more playing and we'd be left with sci-fied Sex and the City, and we wouldn't want that--or would we?
No comments:
Post a Comment