A few years ago, Prime Video delivered one of the best Philip K. Dick small-screen adaptations of all time. Like most adaptations of Philip K. Dick’s works, even the Prime Video sci-fi show in question took many creative liberties to translate the author’s complex prose to the screen. However, the show seems to set up the perfect blueprint for how Netflix’s upcoming Philip K. Dick adaptation should honor its source material.
Doing justice to Philip K. Dick’s stories with screen adaptations has never been an easy feat. While the ones like Blade Runner have only borrowed the core themes from his stories, others, like Minority Report and Total Recall, have significantly changed their original stories to work on the screen. Only a few, like A Scanner Darkly, have proven to be loyal adaptations that avoid drifting too far from their source.
Prime Video’s The Man in the High Castle is also based on a Philip K. Dick novel of the same name. It treads the same path as most other adaptations and only attempts to capture the essence of its source material’s themes. Despite taking many creative liberties, however, the show works incredibly well and stays fairly engaging almost throughout its runtime.
Prime Video’s The Man In The High Castle Is One Of The Better Philip K. Dick Adaptations
Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle is the perfect example of why his books are usually not easy to adapt for the screen. It is packed with heavy internal monologue and defies the pacing conventions of traditional storytelling. Despite this, Prime Video’s The Man in the High Castle manages to do a satisfying job of taking its alternate history premise and expanding its world-building to a multi-season narrative.
The show takes many creative liberties and features arcs that are completely different from what we get in the original book. However, it never seems to lose sight of Philip K. Dick’s vision as it prompts viewers to ask many compelling questions surrounding the fragility of reality and the machinery that runs an empty totalitarian government.
Like all Philip K. Dick stories, it dabbles with themes surrounding identity by portraying how some of its main characters face extreme identity crises after encountering alternate versions of themselves. The stories of many characters highlight the fluid and decentralized nature of human identity as the show reveals alternate versions of themselves across slightly carrying parallel timelines.
In typical Philip K. Dick style, The Man in the High Castle also dares to end its run on an abrupt note instead of giving viewers all the answer. Owing to this, its ending arguably feels a little too rushed and sudden. However, it is hard not to appreciate how the show honors the author’s love for ambiguity instead of treading the same path as most run-of-the-mill sci-fi shows.
Netflix’s Upcoming Philip K. Dick Adaptation Can Learn From The Man In The High Castle
Netflix is adapting Philip K. Dick‘s The World Jones Made. Titled The Future is Ours, the small-screen project is set to modernize the original story and even change it in more ways than one. As reports confirm, the show will center its story on an ecological disaster rather than adopting the original story’s post-nuclear setting.
The original story also introduces an intriguing but strange alien plot, which the show is seemingly not removing from its story. These major changes in the show could prove to be problematic. However, considering how grounding its original novel’s absurdities in bureaucracy helped The Man in the High Castle work on the small-screen, taking a similar approach might favor The Future Is Ours.
Beyond being relatable and realistic, however, the show must ensure that it does not try to oversimplify every idea and story thread from the original story. Especially when it comes to portraying its characters, the show must rise above typical “good vs. evil” narratives and embrace the moral ambiguity that defines Philip K. Dick’s work.
Hopefully, Netflix’s The Future is Ours will be as compelling of a Philip K. Dick adaptation as Prime Video‘s The Man in the High Castle.
