Blogs: Richard rails against the big plan

Richard currently works in a Birmingham law firm, after completing a contemporary history degree. He’s thinking about a paralegal career, but also has media ambitions.

I recently watched the film The Adjustment Bureau and, despite the very nice suits and fedora hats that many of the cast wore, it was rubbish. A poor man’s Dark City. It starred every young English actor ever including Emily Blunt and one of the chaps from Mad Men. Matt Damon was the lead and the premise of the film was that Matt Damon’s character was being kept from being with the person he loved (Blunt) because their love was never meant to be. It wasn’t part of the plan.

The members of the eponymous Adjustment Bureau could alter reality in such a way that the plan is always rigidly adhered to. As such, the everyday serfs go about their business not aware that a very well tailored group of guardian angels/secret reality police are messing stuff up for them on a daily basis (making them miss buses, spilling coffee on them and dropping pianos on their heads). That sort of thing. The endless tampering of the Bureau is done in order to please an apparently benevolent overlord, irrespective of what we might think of it all.

Spoiler alert! In the end everything is fine. You see Matt Damon isn’t a regular mortal like you or me, he’s going to be President eventually, and Emily Blunt is going to be a famous ballet star. So the plan gets changed to accommodate their seemingly unstoppable love and everything is fine forever.

Now call me paranoid if you like, but if the main characters were, ‘Steve the man whose firm has disappeared in to the abyss and is now staring down the barrel of unemployment’ and ‘Janice the girl who works in a shop but is also quite good at painting but can’t possibly make a career out of it as things stand’ I don’t think the almighty scheme of things would’ve changed all that much. I imagine the shady members of the Bureau wouldn’t have given a hoot about their feelings and would have made them get on with it, or… wiped their brains (which is another thing they normally do to people who defy the plan).

In the quite tumultuous world we live in at the moment I can’t help but think that people with slightly less affluent lifestyles would have made for better, more emotive protagonists and probably a better film. As things stand, if there is an enormous plan for everyone, whoever drew it up really does have some explaining to do.

Anyway, I am off to buy myself a cool suit and a hat. I might pretend it’s the 50s. Everything was fine in the 50s.