dystopian masterpiece Blade Runner 28 years ago. The four-hour miniseries, written by British playwright and screenwriter Howard Brenton (The Churchill Play, Spooks), is based on one of Dick’s best pieces of speculative fiction, which imagines what would have happened if the United States lost World War II and ceded California to the Japanese.

Dick excelled at the High Concept. Fueled by a dark imagination and a deep distrust of authority, he produced an extraordinary stream of paranoia-saturated novels and short stories.

When Dick died of a stroke at age 53 in 1982, the author left behind a body of work that has inspired some of Hollywood’s most provocative films. Revolving around the notions of memory, time travel, robotics, and surveillance as manipulated by mega-corporations and corrosive government bureaucracies, PKD film spin-offs have often included stunning visions of the future. But some of them, not so much. Here’s a list of seven movies trafficking in the realm of Philip K. Dick’s imagination, for better and for worse.

Blade Runner

High Concept: Ridley Scott’s 1982 movie transformed Dick’s original short story Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? into a feature film with epic visuals. Los Angeles in the year 2019 serves as the backdrop to a meticulously detailed drama: Harrison Ford as replicant hunter Rick Deckard, goes looking for humanity in all the wrong places.
Freak Factor: Scott worked to improve the film for years before authorizing the so-called “Final Cut” DVD on December 18, 2007.

A Scanner Darkly

High Concept: Based on Dick’s 1977 novel, this 2006 film, set in the author’s adopted home of Orange County, portrays the southern California suburbs as a sun-bleached, drug-infested mallscape. Keanu Reeves plays the undercover cop forced to spy on his friends. Director Richard Linklater threw Dick’s surreal vision of a surveillance-driven fascist state into high relief by layering live action photography with an advanced animation process known as interpolated rotoscoping (which he used earlier in his film Waking Life).

Freak Factor: The Scramble Suit, a sensor-embedded outfit that masks the wearer’s identity, enables Scanner characters to preserve their cover and remain anonymous when dealing with sources, moles, informants, and each other.

Total Recall

High Concept: Adapted from PKD’s We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, this 1990 action picture from director Paul Verhoeven put Arnold Schwarzenegger through his paces as a normal guy in the year 2084 who discovers that his entire life is a virtual fabrication. Cut to the big action sequences in a Martian mining colony populated with mutants. The movie achieved a rare fusion of effective action and mind-twisting conundrums.

Freak Factor: The telepathic mutant resistance leader Quatto, who lives inside the torso of his human host.

Minority Report

High Concept: Based on Dick’s 1958 short story of the same name, the hit Tom Cruise vehicle from 2002 effectively exploited the author’s ingenious hook: A “Precrime” unit stops murders before they happen. Director Steven Spielberg and his team fleshed out the premise with startling precision by imagining Washington D.C. circa 2054, as an urban technoscape serviced by vertical taxis.

Freak Factor: Samantha Morton, as Agatha the Pre-Cog, managed simultaneously to be both creepy and empathetic.

Next

High Concept: Dick’s 1954 short story “The Golden Man” inspired this 2007 release starring Nicolas Cage as an unscrupulous Las Vegas magician Cris Johnson who exploits his ability to see a few minutes into the future. An FBI counter-terror agent (Julianne Moore) recruits Johnson to prevent a terrorist group’s nuclear assault by tapping into time portals to alter destinies. 53 years after the story was hatched, Next’s time-shifting plot twists fizzled at the box office, the once-innovative concept now way too familiar to challenge modern moviegoers.

Freak Factor: Mr. Cage may have a fascination with magicians. The actor regularly attends sleight-of-hand performances at Los Angeles’ Magic Castle and successfully lobbied Disney to re-make The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. He played the sorcerer.

Paycheck

High Concept: Director John Woo’s 2003 adaptation of the Dick story started off with a bang: For security reasons, Ben Affleck’s engineering genius Michael Jennings has his memory erased each time he completes a top secret project. Instead of the $90 million paycheck he expects after finishing a three-year project, he instead receives an envelope full of random trinkets, ticket stubs and other seemingly useless objects. He then has to decipher his own mind as he figures out that objects are clues he himself has left behind to unlock secrets to his past. The movie descends into a succession of clunky action sequences as Jennings teams up with an uninspired Uma Thurman to do battle with the big corporation.

Freak Factor: Memory wiping, a favorite Dick motif, has now become a standard sci-fi trope.

Bonus material: Here are Dick’s original notes, courtesy of his official website: “How much is a key to a bus locker worth? One day it’s worth 25 cents, the next day thousands of dollars. In this story, I got to thinking that there are times in our lives when having a dime to make a phone call spells the difference between life and death. Keys, small change, maybe a theater ticket-how about a parking receipt for a Jaguar? All I had to do was link this idea up with time travel to see how the small and useless, under the wise eyes of a time traveler, might signify a great deal more. He would know when that dime might save your life. And, back in the past again, he might prefer that dime to any amount of money, no matter how large.”

The Adjustment Bureau

High Concept: Director George Nolfi, who wrote the script for The Bourne Ultimatum, steers Matt Damon through this upcoming thriller based on Dick’s sci-fi short story “Adjustment Team.” Damon plays a New York politician who gets in over his head after meeting a dancer (Emily Blunt). Fringe-style paranoia kicks in as as mysterious men in hats push the action into wormhole land.

Freak Factor: Damon generated suspense to spare in the Jason Bourne trilogy and The Departed. The trailer looks promising, so there’s reason to be optimistic about this thriller. However, the movie, originally slated for a July 30 release, got bumped to Sept. 17, then pushed back once again to March 2011.

Follow us on Twitter: @hughhart and @theunderwire.

See Also:

• Wired 11.12: The Second Coming of Philip K. Dick
• Production Designer Syd Mead's Blade Runner Collectibles Hit Auction Block
• Philip K. Dick Estate in Pursuit of Google's Nexus One
• Minority Report Blu-ray Explores Spielberg's Futuristic Vision …
• Six Real Gadgets Minority Report Predicted Correctly

Authors: Hugh Hart

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