Amusing... but totally unfaithful.

Rating: 2/10 (14 July 2006)

Okay, so as funny-terrible as the whole movie was... when I read the short story, "We can Remember it For You Wholesale" by Phillip K. Dick, I was really astonished at how different the two are. Day and night. I mean, the action sequences aside, the meaning of the story was so different... I don't know how they ended up at that conclusion.
In We can remember... the man goes to get the fictional vacation to Mars like in the movie (of course, he doesn't pick out the ideal female or anything in this version). In fact, he's not married, or if he is, his wife isn't a secret agent. And he never actually goes to Mars in real life, either. Like in the movie, they can't write to his brain, there's stuff there, and yes, he was a secret agent once. However, that wasn't the real problem. Unlike the movie, the story goes on to present even more worrying conclusions that have little to do with the idea of Mars, secret agents or space travel.
Instead, once the doctors can't erase the memories he's remembered from his secret agent work, they try to re-write it with what his deepest fantasy would be. They do a lot of testing and uncover that his fantasy is that when he was a small child, mouse-sized aliens came down to earth and met him, gave him some magic gifts, and decided that they would delay destruction of the planet until they died. The doctors then find out that this is entirley true, these are his memories- and that they can't kill the man or erase his memories, because the memories won't erase, and if they kill him, the planet will be destroyed.
Somehow, that's so much more disturbing than the action movie with the midget prostitues. I'm not claiming that its anything really deep or earth-shattering, its just a totally different kind of thing. I'm not sure what the ever-paranoid Phillip K. Dick would think of the action movie, but... I don't think it was his original intent.