The only true Philip K Dick movie

For the full Dickhead experience only one film comes close

Blade Runner is the most famous movie adaptation of Philip K Dick. And it might be the greatest ever science fiction movie.

But Blade Runner, on the scale of PKDness, rates pretty low. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is a much, much stranger book.

Minority Report is the least Dickish of all the major PKD adaptations. A Spielberg movie is a Spielberg movie.

Paycheck, Imposter and Next are from the noughties Hollywood that took a PKD concept and glued it onto a standard 3 act action movie.

Minimal Dick here.

The Adjustment Bureau is almost a Dick movie until it turns into more of a Matt Damon action movie vehicle.

1995s Screamers is really quite Phillipian. But it’s early PKD before the true paranoia set in.

This will be controversial, but Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall is semi-Dicked. The action sequences aren’t Dick. But the impossibility of ascertaining true reality, or trusting another human, is quintessential Dick.

But for the full Dickhead experience only one film comes close

A Scanner Darkly

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Philip K Dick’s partially autobiographical chronicle of 70s hippie drug culture takes place under the eternal sunshine of southern California. Even the book’s nighttime is saturated with the electric glare of strip mall lighting and the glow of the television screen.

The darkness of A Scanner Darkly isn’t in this color saturated 24 hour consumer culture. It’s the darkness of those who fall through the fractures of that culture. The darkness of intellectual and emotional fragmentation.