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#180 - The Adjustment Bureau
George Nolfi, 2011
When a politician meets a strange woman and falls for her, he soon ends up being pursued by mysterious agents with unexplained powers.
The Adjustment Bureau has a somewhat promising sci-fi premise - that of a supernatural agency that controls the world by making subtle manipulations to people and objects - but it's unfortunately used in the service of a fairly trite romantic plot. Matt Damon and Emily Blunt provide the leads - while Damon ultimately isn't good enough to carry out his duties as a protagonist (though maybe that's because of how thinly defined said protagonist is), Blunt does surprisingly well considering her rather limited role as the love interest who only seems to appear sporadically. The members of the titular bureau are supposed to be emotionless non-humans and their actors act accordingly, though some credit has to go to Anthony Mackie playing the one agent who starts to question his station and Terence Stamp as the true believer who serves as an extremely efficient major antagonist.
In theory, the combination of science-fiction and romance sounds like it should yield an interesting result, especially considering how the film does tangentially address issues of free will and the overall nature of humanity. There are also parts of the film's world-building that are interesting, such as the bureau's agents being able to teleport using doorways (which does involve some decent effects work) or the moments where the agents delve into the reason for their existence, but of course this ends up being extremely secondary to Damon's drive to reunite with Blunt by any means necessary. It starts off with a couple of meet-cutes and, though later revelations do sort of justify how these near-total strangers keep together no matter how the bureau interferes, the leads don't have enough chemistry to make their union charming or watchable. The attempts to graft sci-fi elements onto a standard romance films stretches all the way through to a fantastic variation on a clichéd romantic ending or two and the ramifications of the film's mythos seem to be ignored in the face of this. The Adjustment Bureau is a tolerable enough film, but there's no getting around how it sacrifices its most intriguing qualities for the sake of being a weak (though not that badly-acted) romance.
George Nolfi, 2011
When a politician meets a strange woman and falls for her, he soon ends up being pursued by mysterious agents with unexplained powers.
The Adjustment Bureau has a somewhat promising sci-fi premise - that of a supernatural agency that controls the world by making subtle manipulations to people and objects - but it's unfortunately used in the service of a fairly trite romantic plot. Matt Damon and Emily Blunt provide the leads - while Damon ultimately isn't good enough to carry out his duties as a protagonist (though maybe that's because of how thinly defined said protagonist is), Blunt does surprisingly well considering her rather limited role as the love interest who only seems to appear sporadically. The members of the titular bureau are supposed to be emotionless non-humans and their actors act accordingly, though some credit has to go to Anthony Mackie playing the one agent who starts to question his station and Terence Stamp as the true believer who serves as an extremely efficient major antagonist.
In theory, the combination of science-fiction and romance sounds like it should yield an interesting result, especially considering how the film does tangentially address issues of free will and the overall nature of humanity. There are also parts of the film's world-building that are interesting, such as the bureau's agents being able to teleport using doorways (which does involve some decent effects work) or the moments where the agents delve into the reason for their existence, but of course this ends up being extremely secondary to Damon's drive to reunite with Blunt by any means necessary. It starts off with a couple of meet-cutes and, though later revelations do sort of justify how these near-total strangers keep together no matter how the bureau interferes, the leads don't have enough chemistry to make their union charming or watchable. The attempts to graft sci-fi elements onto a standard romance films stretches all the way through to a fantastic variation on a clichéd romantic ending or two and the ramifications of the film's mythos seem to be ignored in the face of this. The Adjustment Bureau is a tolerable enough film, but there's no getting around how it sacrifices its most intriguing qualities for the sake of being a weak (though not that badly-acted) romance.