Whoa - so many good reviews...

Rating: Null/10 (21 June 2002)

...Am I really the only one who dislikes this film?
This film, which I saw just earlier today, is based on a short story by science fiction master Philip K Dick. PKD fans can rest assured that the original story is more or less intact. Even the cheesier bits, like the precogs, have been retained - also the title, the character names, and a lot of what happens.
But PKD's stories get a lot more original than this. Let's face it, anyoine who has read PKD's stuff is not lilkely to latch onto this mid-1950s mild porridge as a good story to adapt. Is this really even worth adapting? To me it was a lapse in PKD's usual brilliance. Come on!
Anyway, the end resulyt is a film that has all the cheese of 1950s pulp sci-fi. Frankly, the script stinks badly. The changes that were made to the original story - and there are some - neatly remove the tight plotting of the original story. A morass of shapeless dialogue is left. The action is silly. The pacing is off. There are boring sections that you wouldn't believe. I can see no action-film buff enjoying this, any more than an intellectual, or a sci-fi geek.
Although I repect the fact that other people have a right to like a film that I dislike, here is an example of a film that I think is so blatantly flawed that I wonder what all the other reviewers are on. Did they even see the same film I did??!
As a PKD fan, I can only say that I am glad PKD's stories are being given such wide audience now! The Matrix, The Truman Show, The Thirteenth Floor, Dark City, Blade Runner, Total Recall, Screamers, Existenz, Cube, Fight Club, Sixth Sense, Memento, and now Minority Report, are all based on that late genius' ideas.
If only Spielberg had done this better, and/or used one of Mr Dick's more original stories to adapt! I want to see Ubik or Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch on the big screen, please! Though it would probably give the studios ulcers if they found out how unconventionally strange these stories are...
PS, the Matrix is really cool, and it's probably THE most adequate adaption of PKD's ideas to date!!!