The Adjustment Bureau (2011) | Sci-Fi Saturdays

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If this film is successful, then we’ll also get The Adjustment Credenza and The Adjustment Chest of Drawers.

In the realm of early 21st Century sci-fi films, The Adjustment Bureau is a mostly bland adaptation of a story by Philip K. Dick. It has some fun moments but ends up being a film that over-explains its key concepts, giving the audience only the appearance of free will.

First Impressions

A man running for the New York senate meets a British woman who he becomes enamored with. He sees her again the next day on a bus. The intertitles say that this has all gone according to plan. A man in a hat is standing over their bed watching them sleep. Their plan! A group of men dressed in 1950s-looking suits and hats reveal themselves to the man as architects who keep the world proceeding as planned. He was never supposed to see the woman again, and if continues to pursue her he ruins not only his life but hers. The man takes the woman and runs from The Adjustment Bureau.

Presented below is the trailer for the film.

The Fiction of The Film

David Norris (Matt Damon) experiences meteoric success on the campaign trail during his run for the New York Senate seat until an unflattering video from a past college frat party emerges. Four men in suits and fedoras stand on a rooftop nearby. Their leader, Richardson (John Slattery), says he can get this back on track. Before his concession speech, which David is practicing in the men’s room, he meets Elise (Emily Blunt). They have immediate chemistry and share a kiss before she runs off. David gives an inspired concession speech which puts him back on course. At some later date, Richardson tells Harry (Anthony Mackie) he needs to be sure to spill coffee on David at 7:05 am as he walks through a park. Harry falls asleep and misses David.

David boards a city bus and bumps into Elise again. He flirts and gets her number, excited to have run into her again. At his office, David walks into the boardroom to find his co-workers frozen and mysterious men in suits and hats “adjusting” them. He runs but is captured. Richardson decides to level with him. They were recalibrating people so that they stayed on plan, and David was not supposed to have seen that. He was to have missed his bus and gotten to work late, after the adjustment. Richardson confiscates Elise’s phone number, as David should have never run into her again. David is told he must never speak of this to anyone.

At a local bar, Harry meets up with David to explain. They take a ride on a boat as Harry tells him they’re not mind readers, and not quite angels but case workers making sure things work out to The Chairman’s plan. Richardson will make sure that David is never with Elise, so David should stop trying. Three years later, David miraculously sees Elise on the street. They grab a bite to eat, but she’s still upset he never called her. David is unable to fully explain but vows not to let her get away again. Richardson mobilizes his team to get them apart because if they kiss the ripples will be over the limit of Richardson’s authority to change.

Richardson redirects Elise’s dance rehearsal from a location near David’s campaign announcement venue, back into the city. When David goes looking for her after his speech, Richardson delays him by silencing phones and redirecting taxi cabs. Richardson is told by a supervisor named Donaldson (Donnie Keshawarz) that David and Elise were actually supposed to be together until the plan changed in 2005. They call in Thompson (Terence Stamp) and his years of experience to squash the relationship before it gets out of hand. David and Elise spend the night at a club and sleep together. The next morning, out of the blue, her ex-boyfriend Adrian (Shane McRae) calls her.

David is sidetracked after a television appearance and Thompson lays it on the line. If David continues to see Elise both his career and hers will be tragically destroyed. David refuses to give up, so Thompson causes Elise to sprain an ankle during a performance. After that David decides to walk away. Eleven months later, a newspaper article announces a wedding between  Elise and Adrian. Harry meets with David to let him know that if he’s with Elise, she will be enough for him and his drive to pursue politics into the White House will diminish. David decides to buck the system, so Harry teaches him how their hats work–allowing them to walk through a door into another part of the city. They practice the route David must take to get to the courthouse before Thompson stops him.

David takes off to break up the wedding. Inside the courthouse, he tells Elise that he knows she loves him and takes her through multiple doors to show her that what he told her about the Adjustment Bureau is true. David offers her a choice: stay behind or come with him. She chooses to be with David, knowing the risks. David turns the knob on a door counterclockwise and they enter the realm of the Adjustors. Hoping to plead his case to The Chairman, David and Elise run to the rooftop, but are cornered by Thompson. Harry emerges with news, he has a new plan just handed down. David and Elise have shown true compassion for each other, and they will be allowed to make their own future, together.

“It doesn’t matter how you feel. What matters is what is in black and white.” – Richardson

History in the Making

To date, The Adjustment Bureau is the last original film made from a Philip K. Dick story. The only films based on Dick’s work to be released in the last 15 years are a remake of Total Recall (2012) and Blade Runner sequel, Blade Runner 2049. Since that 1982 adaptation of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Hollywood has had an on-again/off-again love affair with Dick’s source material. They end up being a mix of great films based moderately on PKD stories, or mediocre films that have a passing familiarity with the source material. The Adjustment Bureau falls into the latter category. It’s based on the 1954 short story Adjustment Team, which was released in the magazine Orbit Science Fiction. It has a short premise that follows the major strokes of this film: a man discovers the world-behind-the-world, where things are adjusted by individuals working for The Old Man. Instead of Harry oversleeping, it’s a dog, which is supposed to bark at a specific time. After learning the truth the main character must promise never to reveal it to anyone. Most of the films adapted from Dick’s work are based on either short stories (like this one) or novelettes–which are usually a little longer; only Blade Runner and A Scanner Darkly have been based on full novels. That creates the main issue regarding the inconsistency seen between his adaptations. Dick’s stories all have interesting twists and turns, but a 20-40 page story doesn’t have much meat attached to it, requiring a lot of padding or additional story elements from the screenwriter. In some cases, like Total Recall or Minority Report, they work. But others, like Screamers or Paycheck, fall shy of the goal.

Genre-fication

The Adjustment Bureau is one of those science fiction films without aliens, robots, or spaceships. Instead, its world is built very much like ours but with a hidden agenda of people controlling and guiding the destinies of humanity. It shares similarities with Dark City and They Live, two films with a similar sort of reveal. All three movies have humans going about their daily lives unaware that a potentially darker agenda is at play. Dark City, the most dire of the realities, reveals that a small group of humans live on a spacecraft and are being studied by aliens who alter their memories and surroundings nightly. They Live is a bit more “normal” with humanity living under the auspices of aliens who use subliminal messaging to control the media and government. The Adjustment Bureau seems almost benign in comparison with “angels” and The Chairman controlling the fate of billions of people. If all Matt Damon has to worry about is them telling him that he can’t date a certain woman, he’s gotten off easy. If anything, the film is more of a lighter sci-fi fare, since the members of the Adjustment Bureau may or may not be godlike entities directing humanity. Why are they doing it? That’s never revealed. It could be they had some part in creating humanity. Or it’s an experiment of sorts. It’s not that it’s a dangerous reality unless you see behind the curtain, which then exposes the disturbing nature that no one is really in control of their lives.

Societal Commentary

Most of the films reviewed on Sci-Fi Saturdays have a moral that they want to share or a commentary they want to make about society. Whether that’s a grandiose idea about the evolution of mankind (2001: A Space Odyssey) or something silly about learning to cope with past decisions (Hot Tub Time Machine), these themes are usually not stated outright; until this film. The Adjustment Bureau comes right out and has Matt Damon’s character ask, “Whatever happened to free will?” Thompson also chides David that he can’t outrun fate. These types of statements make it feel as if the filmmakers did not trust the audience to discern that these Adjusters who cause things to happen and make sure the world runs “according to plan” were really altering people’s fates. It ends up dumbing the movie down to the lowest common denominator, and not giving the audience the free will to decide for themselves.

Thompson provides a couple of examples of times when humanity was allowed to choose free will. Things didn’t go too well for us at those times–showing that people are untrustworthy to be allowed to choose for themselves. The first, Thompson says, was the Dark Ages which the adjusters let run for five centuries. The second time was in 1910 which led to “World War I, the Depression, Fascism, the Holocaust,” and the near destruction of the planet. Conspiracy theorists surely called this one, shouting “I knew it,” while watching the film. It’s an interesting aside or meta-commentary using the actual state of humanity to build a case for the fictional events in the film. But why then? And why now? No other Adjuster until Harry has thought to question their role in all this? If the Plan is sacred, then why is there strife outside of the “free will” zones? And if the Plan changes, why aren’t Adjusters informed so they can do their job better? It seems as if the filmmakers were likening The Chairman and the Adjusters to a bureaucratic business group with lots of red tape which screws things up because the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. There were surely better ways to adapt Dick’s story into something that doesn’t turn the omniscient (or near-omniscient) beings that control the universe into idiots.

The Science in The Fiction

Arthur C. Clarke is famous for his quote, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” This leads to the question, is The Chairman and the Adjuster’s powers based on magic or science? As a film being looked at on Sci-Fi Saturdays, it’s assumed that they use advanced science to perform their miraculous feats, for reasons to be discussed. While Richardson likes to tell David that he has the ability to read his mind, that’s just something he says to spook the locals. Harry reveals to David later that the Adjusters “perceive” human minds weighing options, and can “sense” when someone is about to go off plan. These appear to be powers indicative of their species, and not a piece of technology that they use. They also seem to be able to appear and disappear at will, but as we learn that’s due to some of their magnificent technology. Besides their near-omnipotent powers, they have two pieces of tech that are shown in the film: their book showing individuals’ paths through time/space, and their fedoras. While David never uses the book, it’s clear that humans (like the audience) can see colored circles moving across the pages, tracing out the destiny of an individual. The rest of the page, with its undecipherable squiggles and glyphs, appears to be language or imagery beyond the comprehension of humans. The Adjusters hats, on the other hand, are a technology that works for anyone. David is able to wear Harry’s hat and utilize the network of doors to hop around the city. The hat doesn’t appear to imbue any special powers to the wearer but interacts with the doors of New York when David turns the knob clockwise or counterclockwise. It probably works off Bluetooth technology.

The Final Frontier

All in all The Adjustment Bureau is an okay movie with an average plot. It doesn’t offer any new or fantastical insight on the nature of fate or free will, in the way that films like The Matrix, Minority Report, or even Hot Tub Time Machine are capable of. It did bring Emily Blunt to a wider audience prior to her co-starring in the 2011 time travel brain-bender Looper, and the 2014 Tom Cruise sci-fi action film Edge of Tomorrow. But not every film can be an amazing piece of cutting edge cinema. There need to be average films, where audiences leave the film happy, or at least satisfied that the protagonist was able to overcome the obstacles in their way. When you think about it fully, it’s not the most overall pleasing type of ending. David and Elise get to live and grow old together, while everyone else is still stuck being manipulated by the Adjustors. Too bad for everyone else, suckers!

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