The best Philip K Dick Films That Aren’t

Philip K Dick (PKD) was a prolific Science Fiction writer. If he were to be considered a “Hard” Sci-Fi author, his science field of choice would have to be philosophy: so you’d have to consider that a science, too.

A few of PKD’s stories have been turned into movies, including Minority Report; Total Recall (originally We Can Remember It For You Wholesale); Paycheck (urgh) and Blade Runner (originally Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), arguably the most important science fiction film ever made.

However, perhaps the best legacy left by PKD is the films that aren’t based on his stories, but undeniably based on the same concepts as he mapped out. Here are the ones I think are worthy of mention.

The Terminator, Harlan Ellison and Screamers

The Terminator was released in 1984 and was an enormous success. The SF writer Harlan Ellison received an out-of-court settlement due to the similarity between this story and his own Outer Limits episode Demon with a Glass Hand (1964). However (and I haven’t seen Ellison’s episode), I find the most striking similarity between the Terminator and Philip K Dick’s pair of stories Second Variety (1953) and Jon’s World (1954).

(similarities between the post-apocalypic worlds and the machines-disguised-as-humans for infiltration).

This is quite an alarming similarity, but one of the main ingredients of The Terminator is missing: that of Time Travel. This is the primary theme of the short-story ‘sequel’ Jon’s World.

Of course, Second Variety was itself adapted into a movie in 1995 called ’’Screamers’’.

12 Monkeys / La Jetee

The Thirteenth Floor

eXistenZ

Dr. Strangelove

This probably shouldn’t be in this list. PKD had clearly heard of Dr. Strangelove, as he titled one of his novels Dr. Bloodmoney (or how we got along after the Bomb). The film has a similarly sarcastic-in-the-face-of-oblivion feel to it that many of Dick’s stories do.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Memento

The Matrix