Are they really sure I am not a super agent and an engineer. After all, I am an evil genius

I have written before at length about the various film adaptations of the writings of Philip K Dick. On one such occasion, I noted that director John Woo was making a film starring Ben Affleck based on Dick's short story "Paycheck". There is now a trailer available. (It's only small sized, so it is probably just about watchable over dialup). From just looking at the trailer, the film looks pretty good, and very faithful to the source material. We will see if the film retains the ending of the original story. The last film adaptation of a Philip K. Dick story was Steven Spielberg's Minority Report. That one completely changed the ending and in doing so thoroughly trashed the source material. I doubt this one will, however, given that the ending of the original story is unusually upbeat for Dick, and the story is constructed in such a way that changing the ending would render the rest of the story completely incomprehensible.

However, the main character did not have a first name in the original story. In the movie, he does. And the one they chose is going to make watching the film somewhat disconcerting, I fear.