REVIEW: Philip K Dick's Electric Dreams - Kill All Others

With a title like Kill all Others, it is not a surprise that the film opens with the word productivity, and capitalism, and well, America. Advertising holograms are everywhere.

Then there's a bus ride filled with political news. A single candidate for an election. People look on with disinterest. Then the workplace. The chatter, "You're depressed because you haven't purchased anything in a while."

His coworkers tell him to buy cheese. His wife buys coffee. The advertising holograms can be sex symbols. That's why she buys coffee and he buys cheese. The politics continue on the projections in the room.

America is a great mega nation - only no one really seems to be all that happy. A casual drop during the speech, "As you know, we have to kill all others..."

Only it seems our protagonist is the only one who seemed to hear this line. Thus we go down one of Philip K Dick's classic reality bending story lines. Does something happen because one person observes it, does anyone else?

What if it is struck from the record? What even is media and broadcasting? Our main character in the plot wears a goatee in the same style as Philip K Dick, and the crew behind this episode have clearly placed these elements into the movie with intention.

Mel Rodriguez is cast well as Philbert, who the story focuses on. He has the right amount of underlying anger and suspicion lurking behind his eyes in all the scenes against a reality that is rejecting his perception of events. Is that insanity? Hard to say.

The train he is on has an accident. He's a passenger. He's allegedly to blame. A rather fucked up world. He keeps finding himself back in what appears to be therapy, but is more like an interrogation.

The spectre of Kill all Others continues, along with the mystery of who The Others might be.

I continue to be impressed by the sets, the design, and the unique world building that exists in each and every one of the short movies that has so far made up the Electric Dreams sequence.

One thing that is never left out of these episodes is the human element. The impact of technology, government interference, corporate initiatives, or changes to the status quo of reality.

This seems to be a heavily recurring theme in Philip K Dick's work, and I am overjoyed to have immersed myself in more and more of it recently. However, there is so much of it to get through. I've been reading several of his novels lately, and I can't help but get hooked into his recurrent question of "Is this real?"

We watch Philbert become backed into an increasingly tight corner, with more and more inquiry directed toward his alleged observational malfeasance.

Philip K Dick always tells us one story - that there is no real way out of the rat runs and mazes that we find ourselves in, be it via democracy, bureaucracy or other systems - because a system is just that - a closed loop, like a noose, tightening lovingly around whatever with the aid of gravity.