The Adjustment Bureau User Reviews

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I assume everyone knows the premise of The Adjustment Bureau by now, and that everyone has at least heard about the "wonderful performances" it features. I want to touch on a different subject; put the philosophical gibberish and actor chemistry aside, and explain why the movie, in my eyes, is terrible sci-fi.

You can have great acting and life changing questions in other types of movies, which is why I think the movie is mediocre. It aims to be sci-fi, and it fails at it.

Now, I assume The Adjustment Bureau was made in the wake of Inception's success. Inception is a thought-provoking sci-fi movie, that was also a box-office hit. What sets Inception apart from The Adjustment Bureau, and what makes it great sci-fi, is ground-rules.

Inception is highly complex, but it's still relatively easy to understand and follow, because it thoroughly explains the rules it plays within, without making too many rules or making them too complex. It also uses some tropes of dreaming, that most people can recognize.

The Adjustment Bureau is NEVER clear on the rules of the world, nor does it lay it out for us. It definitely feels like the rules aren't even clear for the writer, and that it has more Deus Ex Machinas than a construction site*.

In need of a weakness to the "agents" metaphysical awareness, they added the concept that water and rain interferes with their power, and thus adding a scene of expositional dialogue on a boat. Problem solved.

Both Inception and The Adjustment Bureau are sci-fi films, that uses a familiar conflict to introduce us to a different world. Inception uses loss, The Adjustment Bureau uses love. Much in the same way Avatar was essentially Pocahontas in space.

Now, that all falls apart if the world isn't interesting to the viewer, and that's how I felt about The Adjustment Bureau. The world wasn't fleshed out, which made it meaningless. Damon and Blunt might as-well have kissed in a romantic comedy, because that is really the movie's only redeeming quality.

The Adjustment Bureau strives to be so much more, but hesitates to lay the fiction too thick, which makes it seem random and "made up as we get along". The concept is great, but is much better handled in the original Phillip K. Dick short story, that doesn't rely on illogical love stories or bending it's own rules to make the protagonist "win".

Now someone should go write about why the movie industry should stop ruining the works of Phillip K. Dick.

(*You get it? Cranes?!)"We need to propel the plot forward, what do we do?", "The hats are magic!", "Sounds great!".