The Adjustment Bureau recap: a film that doesn't bother to explain itself

"Assume everyone with a hat on is a threat" – Harry Mitchell

When I first bought a Kindle, I couldn't figure out how to turn off the underlined feature showing the passages previous readers found so inspiring and memorable that they digitally underlined them. This was incredibly frustrating because the sort of people who underline sentences in books tend to choose the frilliest, most faux-profound, dreamcatchery, Hallmark, Yankee Candle tracts of craw-clogging bumper sticker insipidness.

The Adjustment Bureau is a film exclusively made of underlined Kindle passages.

Congressman Matt Damon's life is thrown into disarray when he realises that free will is an illusion created by hat-wearing religious people who teleport around the world by turning doorknobs in a funny way, all to force everyone down a set of predetermined emotional tramlines. They want Matt Damon to be president. He just wants to get off with Emily Blunt. Who will win?

This is really the plot, by the way.

"If you ever reveal our existence, we'll erase your brain" – Richardson

Movie stars act as a kind of shorthand for the viewer. It doesn't matter who Tom Cruise plays in Jack Reacher or Oblivion, because he's always really playing Tom Cruise. We don't need to know much back story because it's Tom Cruise – a little man who'll save the day by shouting a lot and running really fast. That The Adjustment Bureau works at all is thanks to the audience's knowledge of the actors, who play concentrated versions of their on-screen personas. Matt Damon plays a wide-eyed everyman. Emily Blunt is a beautiful dancer who can't quite work out the difference between "carefree" and "laughing far too hard at everything". Michael Kelly is an insidery government assistant. Jon Slattery is a man who sometimes wears a hat. There are no casting surprises, which makes it easier for the viewer to accept what happens. And that's good, because what happens is faintly berserk.

"Personally I think mooning your friends at a college reunion is no big deal" – Elise Sellas

It took Lost about four years to soften up viewers enough that they believed it was really just a battle between free will and determinism; The Adjustment Bureau gives us about half an hour. "Here's Matt Damon," it goes. Then: "Isn't Emily Blunt wearing a nice dress?" And then it smacks us in the chops with: "By the way, don't forget that everything anyone ever does is the explicit result of a collusion by mysterious angels who've watched too many Humphrey Bogart films. OK! Bye!"

Perhaps because this is such a big idea to adjust to, The Adjustment Bureau never really hesitates to explain exactly what's going on. The angels – because, screw it, this film gets insanely religious at the end, so they're definitely angels – can't bear to see humans, with their stupid brains and crackpot decision-making processes, ruin the world. So they guide us, either invisibly or through directly aggressive intimidation, by the whims of an unseen figure who is so clearly meant to be God that they may as well have hired Morgan Freeman to follow everyone around and chuckle at everything he does in a vaguely avuncular way. Unless you're Matt Damon, of course, because then the angels just let you do whatever you want. And what did he do next? He made a boring film about fracking. The lesson here: let the angels do whatever they want to do.

Observations

Don't forget that, for some reason, the angels can't see you if you're on a boat. Who knew that humanity would be at its least oppressed onboard a Dover to Calais booze cruise?

The Big Speech at the end does seems to hold together. The angels guided us from the stone age to the Roman empire and then disappeared, but we screwed it up by inventing the dark ages. Then they guided us again until 1910, but we screwed it up by having two world wars and inventing nuclear bombs. Since then, the angels have been firmly in control of everyone. Except for terrorists. And all the genocidal dictators of the last 50 years. And everyone who's responsible for even the slightest bit of climate change. How did they get away with that? Perhaps they all lived on boats.

In the Philip K Dick story on which this film was based, the character Matt Damon plays in the movie was an estate agent with the potential to end the cold war. But the producers had to go with the silly option, didn't they?

Also, look for a cameo by Jon Stewart, in which he reminds us why he's much better at television than film.

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