Good movie that stays pretty close to author's style

Rating: 8/10 (27 June 2002)

SPOILER WARNING
I saw this last night and absolutely loved the first two thirds of it. The ending devolved into a drawn-out mish mash that strayed away from the spirit of Philip K. Dick's writing, but was still satisfying. The first part of the movie did a very good job of sticking within Dick's style of story, common elements of which are: 1) What is reality?, 2) drug use (he had a problem), and 3) who is good/evil?
The more I think about the ending, the more frustrated I become. I have not read the short story upon which this was based, but I would say the point at which we see Anderton lowered into Containment would probably have been Dick's ending. Not only that, it would have come AFTER Max von Sydow's character killed himself and we saw Anderton reunited with his pregnant wife, meaning the "happy" ending was a figment of Anderton's imagination. Tim Blake Nelson's character said something about "all your dreams come true" because of the halo and being in stasis. It's possible that having the warden say that was Spielberg's way of suggesting the end wasn't what we thought. It's also possible Spielberg had it right but later got cold feet when the ending wasn't happy--the closeups of Anderton's face after he was haloed and as he was being lowered into stasis, plus the dream quality of the end sequence of him with his pregnant wife and the pre-cogs on an isolated farm, would fit in to this theory--but they sure seemed to make it clear there was a happy ending.
I highly recommend "Ubik," "Man in the High Castle," and "The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick," which is a five-volume collection of his short stories, to anyone who enjoyed this movie. "Blade Runner," "Total Recall," and "Screamers" are other movies based on Dick stories, but with the exception of "Screamers" (an otherwise bad movie) they so butchered his original story it was virtually unrecognizable.