The Adjustment Bureau
If you liked Inception but found it gave you a headache, then The Adjustment Bureau is the one for you.

Anyone who has ever put on a suit knows exactly how the garment makes you feel slick, powerful and generally like you might know something no-one else does. Add a sharp trilby to the mix and you’ve just leapt to the top step on my (very un-cool) staircase of what’s cool…

Now imagine that your hat is some sort of literal cosmic key made by a  cosmic organisation whose job it is to police fate! Allowing you to  navigate cosmic time and subspace, crossing entire cities in seconds, just by turning your average and not-very-cosmic doorknob! That would make for a rather awe-inspiring film, I’d say, and not your average romance thriller. This supernatural element in The Adjustment Bureau definitely caught my eye.

Taking its inspiration from Phillip K. Dick’s sci-fi short The Adjustment Team, the film attempts to tell the classic story of two lovers kept apart by fate – but with a twist: their fate may be under the control of a very real bureaucratic force. Unfortunately,  the classic story told here is of filmmakers biting off more than they can chew. Splicing an engaging love story with a layered and intelligent sci-fi epic is hard enough to do at the best of times. But hoping to create characters that one can identify with whilst also requiring that you buy into a complete fantasy world is like trying to make a decent G&T using a food mixer and some old bananas. People may want to see you have a go, but at the same time they’ll probably think you’re a bit simple.

Although I’m not won over by Matt Damon’s bulldozer approach to acting and find the “kooky girl makes square guy’s head turn” character that Emily Blunt plays a little old, I have to admit that I found their romance believable and enjoyable. However, it would have benefited by not being brushed over for bigger plotlines. Then again, it can’t be easy to show people falling in love, whilst they’re trying to take on THE MIGHT OF FATE ITSELF!

The film is shot beautifully; sweeping camera movements and sensuous high large angles display the magnitude of Kevin Thompson’s New York-inspired dark Art Deco design. Thomas Newman yet again pulls it out of the bag and his beautiful, reverb-soaked percussive score lends an eerie feel to the film, which is only impinged by a cheesy hard rock interruption in the occasional chase scene.

Ultimately The Adjustment Bureau presents engaging and original ideas; the concept of a team of unexplained telekinetic beings using little notebooks to influence fate is a great one. The parallels between the Bureau and organised religious belief systems work, and the film effectively skewers (some of) humanity’s desperation to believe that ‘someone is up there’, and that love, death, cancer, houmous, and Kinder eggs can all be explained by a great cosmic plan. Following that line of thought, the suggestion that this supernatural and powerful Bureau may not actually know what it’s doing is a tremendous direction to follow. It’s a pity that those ideas end up getting trampled by a big, soppy pink bear shouting about love whilst weeping; the ending felt like it belonged to a different film.

Don’t get me wrong – at times I crave a film about the pink soppy weeping bear. Having said that, I don’t think he can really give me cinematic hugs when he’s performing next to a Jedi-like time wizard dressed as Don Draper.

If you liked Inception but found it gave you a headache, then The Adjustment Bureau is the one for you. With a bit of action, sci-fi wizardry and – most importantly – LOVE, it’s an easy turn-on-tune-out job.

But if, like me, you prefer the idea of a film that really explores each of its intriguing ideas, this is more of a Matrix-shaped hors d’oeuvre than a big Inception-themed three course meal.