The Adjustment Bureau movie review

As a huge Philip K Dick fan, I love to see that his stories are being spread out to a wider audience by making them into movies. But I am somewhat conflicted since most of the movies are mediocre at best. The latest movie to make its way to my HBO subscription is The Adjustment Bureau. Based off a short story from Philip K Dick about a man who accidentally gets a peek behind the scenes of life, the movie pleasantly kept a lot of the same basic ideas with only a change in theme. Dick’s story (“The Adjustment Team”) is about reality (as a lot of his stories are) while the movie is more about predestination. Let’s take a look at the movie. (Warning: Spoilers ahoy).

David Norris (Matt Damon) is a Congressman making a run for a Senate seat when an embarrassing photo makes its way to the front page of the newspaper. While in the bathroom before his concession speech, he runs into a young woman (Emily Blount). She was trying to evade security after she crashed a wedding. They had a quick chat and sparks flew and a kiss happened. After security escorts her away, Norris goes off script and gives a wonderful speech, that brings him back from nowhere and makes him a contender for the next Senate election. A month later, Norris is getting on the bus to go to his first day of work at his new job. Harry, a man who’s been in the background during most of Norris’ scenes wakes up in a start and starts running after Norris. He’s late and misses him. On the bus Norris runs into the girl again. They flirt and she gives him her first name (Elise) and her number. When he gets to the office, everything seems fine until he walks into a conference room and sees all his colleagues frozen and a bunch of guys with hats moving around them. After a brief chase, Norris is brought behind the scenes.

It turns out that Harris was supposed to cause Norris to spill coffee on himself which would have caused him to miss the bus (and more importantly Elise). The hat men work behind the scenes of humanity to make things better and it’s vitally important that Norris and Elise don’t meet any more. They take her number away and threaten him to not see her again. Norris is so desperate that he takes the exact same bus for the next three years in hopes of seeing Elise again. Then he finds her and makes up a mugging story for why he didn’t call her. He promises to visit her dance rehearsal after his next speech. The hat men then try to adjust the world so that he can’t make it but he beats the odds and makes it. The case then gets kicked up higher within the hat men team.

A new operative (Thompson) comes and talks to Norris. He levels with him about the true mission. Norris, if he doesn’t see Elise again, will be President and Elise will becomes a famous dancer. This is for the good of mankind and they don’t want anything getting in the way. And to show how serious he is, he causes Elise to fall during rehearsal and hurt her leg. Norris decides to heed their wishes and leaves Elise. A year later, Norris sees Elise’s wedding announcement and is contacted by Harris. Harris says that the repercussions have been exaggerated and offers to help Norris stop Elise’s wedding. This leads to a big chase through the inner workings of the hat men’s world where Norris and Elise are finally given free will.

The movie was decently done and the free-will vs predestination argument was done decently. Damon and Blount worked together well and had good chemistry. But their was a lot of plot that was skipped in order to have more chase scenes which weren’t nearly as good as the rest of the movie. The big issue I had was with the hat team’s motivations. Here’s Thompson’s big speech about why the hat team interferes:

We actually tried Free Will before. After taking you from hunting and gathering to the height of the Roman Empire we stepped back to see how you’d do on your own. You gave us the Dark Ages for five centuries… until finally we decided we should come back in. The Chairman thought maybe we just needed to do a better job of teaching you how to ride a bike before taking the training wheels off again. So we gave you the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution. For six hundred years we taught you to control your impulses with reason, then in 1910 we stepped back. Within fifty years, you’d brought us World War I, the Depression, Fascism, the Holocaust and capped it off by bringing the entire planet to the brink of destruction in the Cuban Missile Crisis. At that point a decision was taken to step back in again before you did something that even we couldn’t fix. You don’t have free will, David. You have the appearance of free will.

The big issue I have with this speech is that it is very Euro centric. They talk about the Roman Empire, the Renaissance, etc that are all European events. There isn’t any mention of the Persian empire or the Muslims. Nothing about any of the New World civilizations or Asia. It’s almost as if the rest of the world doesn’t exist or doesn’t matter. And if they are there to help humanity, then they are ignoring a large section of them. It seemed like the movie makers either had no interest in or were ignorant of other parts of history. It just struck me as a silly omission.

Overall it wasn’t a bad movie. It dealt briefly with Dick’s reality themes before moving on to other themes. I wouldn’t mind seeing it occasionally again, but I have no desire to purchase it or own it. It’s decent but not great. Mildly recommended.