10 Philip K Dick Movie Adaptations Ranked Best To Worst

Published in 1954, Adjustment Team isn’t one of PKD’s best (or best-known) stories, but like a lot of his early tales, it has a fascinating premise: what if the drudgery of the real world was the invention of unseen manipulators? What if the supposedly natural order of things could be “adjusted here and there”?

Like a lot of Dick’s ideas, it’s been incorporated into (one might almost say “ripped off by”) several Hollywood movies, most notably Dark City and The Matrix. These are stylized movies whose visuals were pitched somewhere between film noir and cyberpunk, and by the time The Adjustment Bureau reached the screen in 2011, you couldn’t help but be reminded of them.

Styling his movie to look like a B&W gangster picture shot in glorious colour, director George Nolfi dresses his mysterious strangers like Prohibition-era G men in suits and hats, which works fine but also reminds us of Mr Hand in Dark City and Agent Smith in The Matrix.