Adjustment bureau

Prolific novelist and short-story writer Phillip K. Dick created concepts that have inspired more than a dozen scifi, fantasy and mystery movies, including such blockbusters as Blade Runner, Total Recall and Minority Report. He died from a heart attack at the age of 53 in 1982, after five divorces, substance abuse and a visit from God (he claimed). His work, full of cinematically ideal mysteries and chases, continues to be adapted, as in The Adjustment Bureau (2011).

Fellow-American George Nolfi, a philosophy and political science graduate who switched to writing screenplays, crafted the storyline from Dick's Adjustment Team short story. He'd already successfully adapted Michael Crichton's Timeline for a UK-produced science thriller, one of his own screenplays as the basis for the Oceans Twelve sequel, another writer's novel for his co-production of Michael Douglas's Sentinel, and joined the team adapting The Bourne Ultimatum.

Having worked twice with Matt Damon, Nolfi was able to sign up the star actor, enabling him to raise production funds and secure Emily Blunt, the very busy Brit actress (Young Victoria, Devil Wears Prada) as his lead actress. He was ready for his debut producer-director-writer feature.

The storyline visualised the typical Dick scifi mystery well. Damon plays a NY congressman running for a senate seat. He meets a contemporary dancer (Blunt) by chance, in a men's toilet. They banter, chat and kiss, and the chemistry between the two, and the snappy dialogue, shows them falling in love at first sight, credibly. So much so that audiences root for them once their romance seems doomed and Damon must combat the forces of an invisible Chairman (ie God) and his earthly agents (angels visible only to Damon due to a time-warp slip-up one of them makes).

Damon's politician is destined to be a US president; Blunt's ballerina to become a world-famed choreographer. Their lives are recorded in four-dimensional books administered by the Chairman's bureaucracy, displaying very human irritations and frustrations with their tasks.

Damon must outrun and outwit them, and change their plans, if his love for Blunt is to live. The storyline doesn't tell us why Fate hadn't contrived to give a potential US president a suitable mate, or fully clarify why a previous plan for the couple's romance (explaining their instant attraction to each other) had been changed. Other red herrings and loose ends also don't matter at the time because Nolfi's fast-paced screenplay sprints charmingly to its inevitable happy ending.

En route, a good supporting cast includes Anthony (Hurt Locker) Mackie as a sympathetic black angel, Michael (Criminal Minds) Kelly as Damon's best pal, and Terence Stamp as the menacing divine enforcer of heavenly planning. Adding cameos of "reality", playing themselves, are various famous faces (Jon Stewart twice, James Carville and Mary Matalin, Madeline Albright, Michael Bloomberg and other NY personalities).

Nolfi created an acclaimed and profitable relatively "low-budget" (US$50 million) small-scale version of Nolan's Inception, jumping merrily through time warps, false illusions and four dimensions. He owes a lot to his lead actors, and Dick, but he can claim a lot of credit for himself in Hollywood.