I just wasn’t sold on The Adjustment Bureau, which has received some positive reviews (at least one that I read after I saw it).
This film suggests that the powers that be are hierarchical layers of men – 100% men, by the way – who answer to a nameless, faceless “director.” This director issues detailed plans for our lives that typically we have no control over. The fact that we don’t have control at this point in time has arisen from our own mismanagement. During the historical periods when humans have been granted free will by the “director,” we’ve just messed it all up.
If you watched the preview trailers, you probably think this is a love story with Matt Damon and Emily Blunt, a politician and a dancer both hitched to rising stars.
I guess that is the major storyline, how these characters meet and try to connect over time despite the fact that the plan has changed and they are not supposed to be together.
That was okay, I guess, but frankly, I was so irritated by the fact that people cannot communicate directly with the author of the plan, the director or higher power or God or whatever you want to call this being, and I was put off by the hierarchical structure of layers of so-called case workers working for the director as well as the fact that all of these case workers are men that I just kept thinking about how much it all seemed like a thinly veiled version of the Catholic Church.
My irritation kept me from connecting with this film and from enjoying it very much. The details bugged me, too. Some of the plot points didn’t work for me. After all, those “case workers” have some rather peculiar limits on their powers. These elements just seemed sort of silly and irritating to me.