Amazon’s ‘Electric Dreams’ deftly examines familiar sci-fi ground
If you have burned through the latest season of Netflix’s hot sci-fi anthology “Black Mirror” and are looking for more glossily rendered stories of other worlds to disturb your life, Amazon has got a series for you. “Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams” — you may note in the title a reference to Dick’s novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?,” the basis for “Blade Runner” — adapts 10 stories from a writer already much adapted. (The films “Minority Report,” “Total Recall,” “A Scanner Darkly” and “The Adjustment Bureau” and the Amazon series “The Man in the High Castle” all descend from Dick works.)
The series originated in the U.K. and features a host of recognizable actors from here and over there, including Bryan Cranston, Anna Paquin, Terrence Howard, Geraldine Chaplin, Timothy Spall, Julia Davis, Steve Buscemi and Greg Kinnear. There are American settings and British ones.
Anyone who has sat through a “Twilight Zone” marathon or two, or seen a season of “The X-Files,” will find themselves on familiar ground. “The Father-Thing” is “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” from its head down to its tendrils; the question “Am I, modern-day game designer, dreaming I’m a futuristic female detective, or a futuristic female detective dreaming I’m a 21st-century game designer” at the nub of “Real Life” goes back, in essence, thousands of years to the old man-butterfly conundrum of Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi.There are twist endings, inevitably — being a feature of short stories in general and science-fiction in particular — though you may be surprised that some of these surprises are even presented as surprises, so unsurprising are they.
What’s of interest here, then, is how the stories have been brought to life. Are they fun to watch? Do they give you a little chill, even when you know what’s coming? Those especially attached to Dick’s writing will judge them by the cleverness or aptness of the adaptations, though I’m guessing most viewers will see them fresh.
Some of the stories adapted here are 60 years old, making updates unavoidable: Dick’s 1955 “Foster, You’re Dead!,” a story about bomb shelters and consumerism, for example, has been massaged into “Safe and Sound,” about terrorism and surveillance, though in each case with a teenage protagonist at odds with a skeptical parent. And even the freest adaptations — “Crazy Diamond,” adapted from Dick’s “Sales Pitch,” by Terry Gilliam collaborator Tony Grisoni, works in Syd Barrett on vinyl, a pig-human hybrid and a plot that owes more to James M. Cain than to Dick — take names, settings and ideas from Dick’s texts.
Some are set in space, some in a mostly recognizable Earthly present, some in a future that looks futuristic, some in one that looks antique. That each episode comes with different screenwriters and a different director keeps the series atmospherically unpredictable from episode to episode; it has its better moments and its lesser, but enough of the former to recommend it.