Philip K Dick | The author who dominated 1990s sci-fi cinema

Although his work underpinned Blade Runner and Total Recall, Philip K Dick dominated 1990s sci-fi cinema – and still has plenty of relevance in 2025.

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“You’re here because you know something. What you know you can’t explain, but you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life, that there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad…”

The author Philip K Dick didn’t write a single word of that quote above, but it could easily have come from any one of the 40-something science fiction novels he turned out at a frenetic pace between the 1950s and 1970s.

Written and directed by the Wachowskis and released in 1999, The Matrix was a landmark of visual effects, a box office phenomenon thanks to its blend of Hong Kong cinema, Japanese anime and reality-warping sci-fi. But its central premise, about humanity enslaved by machines, grown in pods and tricked into thinking it was living in the 1990s rather than a post-apocalyptic future, was quintessentially Phildickian.

This isn’t to say that the Wachowskis deliberately ripped off Philip K Dick’s ideas. Rather, they were merely exploring themes that, by the 1990s, were no longer on the fringes of our culture, or solely the preserve of genre addicts poring over dog-eared pulp novels. As the millennium approached, Philip K Dick’s work suddenly seemed to predict the passing of one age and the arrival of another – an age less certain, more paranoid, and vastly more turbulent than the one it was about to replace.

In a quiet sort of way, Philip K Dick grew to dominate 1990s genre cinema. Which is sadly ironic, given that he didn’t live to see just how much of an impact his stories would have on the public’s consciousness. Broke for much of his career, Dick was nearing the end of his life when director Ridley Scott was working on Blade Runner, adapted from the author’s 1968 novel, Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?. 

In the documentary Dangerous Days: Making Blade Runner, visual effects supervisor David Dryer recalled a day during the production when Dick was invited to sit and watch a private screening of some footage from Scott’s work in progress. It amounted to roughly 10 minutes of effects work, cut to the sweeping sounds of Vangelis’s music – flying cars gliding majestically around a benighted, pollution-engulfed Los Angeles.

According to Dryer, Philip K Dick sat, awe-struck. “How is this possible?” the author said. “It’s like you guys hardwired my brain. How can this happen?”

Philip K Dick passed away on the 2nd March 1982 – mere weeks before Blade Runner made its debut that June.

Not that Blade Runner was an immediate hit. Compromised by edits and a now infamous voice over, its collision of dystopia and film noir was initially a box office failure. Philip K Dick’s sombre meditation on what it means to be human, adapted by screenwriters Hampton Fancher and David Webb Peoples, was perhaps out of step with the upbeat, Reaganite 1980s. Much like John Carpenter’s The Thing, which was similarly bleak, audiences largely overlooked it in favour of Steven Spielberg’s suburban fairytale E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, the biggest hit of 1982.

By the early 1990s, however, the Blade Runner’s ethereal brilliance had finally been recognised – helped in no small part by the chance discovery of an unexpurgated workprint, thankfully lacking Harrison Ford’s sullen VO work, released as the Director’s Cut in 1992. 

Blade Runner: The Director’s Cut emerged two years after the first true blockbuster based on the work of Philip K Dick. Directed by Paul Verhoeven, 1990’s Total Recall took the author’s 1966 short story We Can Remember It For You Wholesale and turned it into a gigantic vehicle for action star Arnold Schwarzenegger. 

Schwarzenegger plays construction worker Doug Quaid who – for reasons even he doesn’t understand – has dreams of visiting Mars, which in the near future has become a mining colony. Unable to afford the cost of flying there, Quaid instead visits a sketchy tech company, Rekal Incorporated, which specialises in placing artificial memories in the minds of its customers. But during the procedure, it’s revealed that Schwarzenegger’s protagonist has already visited Mars, and had all recollection of it wiped…

Although adapted by a succession of screenwriters, many of Philip K Dick’s ideas remain in Verhoeven’s violent thriller. Total Recall’s first act is strikingly similar to the original short story, and even in the outlandish set-pieces that unfold on Mars later in the film, the Phildickian question lingers: is anything Quaid experiences real, or is it part of his ego trip at Rekal?

A project that had been in development hell for years, Total Recall’s eventual box office success paved the way for other adaptations of Philip K Dick’s work, including 1995’s Screamers (based on the short story Second Variety) to Minority Report and Paycheck in the 2000s. 

While the number of movies based on Dick’s stories started to gather pace, the 1990s saw the late author’s obsessions and storytelling quirks appear in the work of other filmmakers. 

The Truman Show (1998), written by Peter Weir and Andrew Niccol, is about an all-American everyman, Truman Burbank (Jim  Carrey) who’s unaware that he’s the central character in a hugely elaborate reality TV programme. His wife, friends and co-workers are all actors; the small coastal town he inhabits is a gigantic set, bristling with hidden cameras and stage lights. The focus of the show from his infancy, Truman is subtly prevented from ever leaving the town, but as time goes on, he begins to push against the invisible forces keeping him in his place.

Beautifully written and directed, The Truman Show could be seen as a more wistful, upbeat spin on Philip K Dick’s Time Out Of Joint, first published as a novel in 1959. Like Weir and Niccol’s film, the novel is about an ordinary man – in this case the chronically unemployed Ragle Gumm – who lives in an average 1950s American town. With no job to go to, Gumm instead spends his days entering an odd little puzzle published in his local newspaper. But like Truman Burbank, Gumm sees odd inconsistencies in the world around him which suggest that his reality isn’t quite as it seems.

The truth Gumm uncovers is very different from Truman’s, though the sentiment is strikingly similar. Both aren’t the blandly ordinary people they initially appear to be; they’re secretly the key players in games whose rules have previously been hidden from them. Truman is the unwitting protagonist in a TV show; Gumm has a role to play in an intergalactic war, with the newspaper puzzles he solves being far less frivolous than he originally thought.

The Truman Show was one of the most successful films of 1998. Its $264m take at the box office placed it just outside the year’s highest grossing movies (Lethal Weapon 4 took the number 10 spot with $285m). It was also nominated for no fewer than four Academy Awards – including Best Screenplay for Andrew Niccol. We can only wonder what Philip K Dick, who spent most of his life in financial turmoil and won only one literary award (a Hugo for his 1963 novel, The Man In The High Castle) would have thought about the success of a film that touched on so many of his pet themes. 

Then again, movies that questioned the nature of reality were in vogue in the second half of the 1990s. Aside from The Matrix, Alejandro Amenabar’s acclaimed drama Open Your Eyes (1997) also has certain parallels with Dick’s stories, not least in its blurring of the line between dreams and reality. A success in its native Spain, Open Your Eyes was later remade by Cameron Crowe as Vanilla Sky in 2001.

It might be worth pausing here to ask why echoes of Philip K Dick’s stories reverberated around movies he had no direct involvement in. One possible reason is that, while Dick’s obsessions had their basis in the philosophies of Plato or Gnosticism, they were also modern. His often paranoid questions about the nature of humanity and reality itself made him a popular counter-culture figure in the era of Watergate and LSD (even though he only actually partook of that particular drug once or twice at most). 

What made his work so long-lasting beyond the 1960s was that it was as technological as it was mystical; in the worlds Dick imagined, protagonists were threatened with lawsuits by artificially intelligent doorknobs. Autonomous vehicles dished out marriage advice. Television adverts sold viewers the idea of god in a spray can; miserable residents of other planets found salvation in the miniaturised lives of knock-off Barbie dolls.

As society adapted to such innovations as the video recorder, computers, satellite television and, eventually, the emergence of the internet in the 80s and 90s, Dick’s work only seemed more relevant. David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, released in 1983, dealt with contemporary debates surrounding video, cable TV and censorship in a phantasmagorical way Philip K Dick would have immediately recognised. 

Like many storytellers of his generation, Cronenberg had been a reader of Dick’s work in his younger years, and although he noted its flaws – Dick worked at a prolific rate, and seldom paused to rewrite it – he also acknowledged his significance as an author.

“Philip Dick was interesting because […] he loved to create characters who were just guys working on technology,” Cronenberg told Nightmare Magazine in 2015. “Who would come and fix your talking robotic door that wouldn’t let you out of your apartment, even when you put in the ten cents you were supposed to, or ten credits; whatever it was. He got down to the nitty-gritty of small and local technology.”

Philip Dick’s influence on Cronenberg can be most keenly felt in eXistenZ. Released in 1999, it was Cronenberg’s first original screenplay since Videodrome some 16 years earlier. Set in the near future, it imagined a world in thrall to a new kind of videogame technology, in which people can connect to directly biological pods – a kind of fleshy PlayStation – via a cord connected to their spine. These pods were capable of creating virtual worlds almost indistinguishable from our own, with scenarios dreamed up by game designer Allegra Geller (Jennifer Jason Leigh). The realism of these virtual worlds is such that Allegra has become the target of a terrorist group which violently opposes her work. Narrowly surviving an assassination attempt, Allegra goes on the run with a somewhat meek young security guard, Ted Pikul (Jude Law). 

eXistenZ is filled with the unease of a Philip K Dick story, whether it’s the threat of betrayal at every turn or the eerie sense that, like the fictional drugs in A Scanner Darkly or The Three Stigmata Of Palmer Eldritch, playing the games in eXistenZ can somehow distort the fabric of reality itself. You can’t play one of Allegra’s games without your mind being changed forever.

Interestingly, eXistenZ has some tangential connections to Total Recall. In the 1980s, Cronenberg spent several years working on the film for producer Dino De Laurentiis; after writing around 10 drafts of the screenplay, Cronenberg eventually left the project due to disagreements over its tone (co-producer Ronald Shusett wanted an action film akin to ‘Raiders Of The Lost Ark in space’). Several of the ideas Cronenberg came up with for Total Recall eventually made their way into eXistenZ, however – including the captivatingly weird image of a gun made from animal bones. 

In a bout of synchronicity that would probably have fascinated Dick, eXistenZ emerged in April 1999 – mere weeks after The Matrix appeared in cinemas that March. Brilliant though it was, the fleshy eccentricity of Cronenberg’s film was no match for the Wachowskis’ crowd-pleasing juggernaut, which, like a Philip K Dick novel for the age of the multiplex, fused high-minded philosophical ideas with bullet-strewn action. 

As the millennium came knocking, such films as Dark City (1998) and The Thirteenth Floor (1999) had also explored the subjects of simulated realities and their effects on the protagonists trapped in them. 

Whether movie-goers consciously thought about it or not, the 1990s was a decade of huge technological change. The number of households connected to the web exploded in the early years of the decade, with the beginnings of the dot com boom starting around the year 1995 – a bubble that eventually went pop in the early 2000s. Society was rapidly adapting to the newfound connectivity of the internet and mobile phones; meanwhile, governments and corporations struggled to keep up with the implications of inventions like peer-to-peer file sharing.

By now, we’re so surrounded by ‘smart’ devices that the idea of a talking doorknob hardly seems far-fetched. Dick’s repeated suggestion that we might be being surveilled by our own household items is now an everyday reality. As we’re bombarded with information, immersed in the artificial realities presented on our phones, and constantly left questioning what bit of news is genuine or false, our daily existence in the 2020s isn’t too dissimilar from that of a typical Philip K Dick protagonist. 

Either inadvertently or via some form of cosmic divination, Dick even appeared to predict a modern tech phenomenon that most of us have probably noticed in recent years – what author Cory Doctorow termed ‘enshittification’. The services and platforms we’ve come to rely on have, as their owners bow to the demands of the free market, become markedly worse over time. 

Social media apps are now crowded with bots; Google is awash with adverts and AI-generated search results full of errors. If he were alive today, Dick might call this phenomenon ‘kipple’ – a term he used to describe useless, self-replicating objects that mysteriously clutter up apartments in Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, but could also apply to our own online world.

“No one can win against kipple,” says one of the novel’s characters, John R Isidore, “except temporarily and maybe in one spot, like in my apartment I’ve sort of created a stasis between the pressure of kipple and nonkipple, for the time being. But eventually I’ll die or go away, and then the kipple will again take over. It’s a universal principle operating throughout the universe; the entire universe is moving toward a final state of total, absolute kippleisation.”

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