First of all, this is a book, not a movie. It's by the late great Philip K. Dick. Of course, sooner or later it could BECOME a movie, as so many of his stories have. We shall see.

I am reading it right now. I'm about two thirds of the way through it. I just wanted to check in here and mention that I am wondering if it could have been, in some demented way, the inspiration for Robert Ludlum's Jason Bourne character...?

I probably had that idea partly because the main character's name is Jason. But, the story really does have a lot of common ground with the Jason Bourne stories.

The idea is that, in a futuristic world (it is set in 1988 but was published in 1974, so, yah), this dude Jason Taverner gets in a strange accident, and suddenly wakes up in a world where... his identity is in question. In the Jason Bourne stories, of course, the Jason character wakes up with no memory of who he is, and he promptly gets into all kinds of trouble with the authorities. In this book, the Jason character wakes up and NO ONE ELSE remembers who he is, and he promptly gets into all kinds of trouble with the authorities. There is the added complication that he had been very, very famous in the world he remembers living in. He had been the host of a late night show, who was also a singer. A white guy in his forties singing... sort of like, maybe Tom Jones, Dean Martin, or Bing Crosby at the height of their fame, if they also had their own talk shows? Something like that. He had this very popular TV show at 9:00 PM on Tuesday nights, and remember, this story was imagined in a world in which even Philip K. Dick could not have imagined there being more then three or four television networks operating.

So, EVERYONE should have remembered and recognized him. But no one does. In fact, there is no record of him ever even having existed at all. This presents a lot of problems for him, because the 1988 that PKD envisioned was a heavily fascist police state in which normal people were expected to present lots of documents and identification at various police checkpoints, several times a day, just to get through a typical day in their normal lives.

So, there could be a few things going on, considering that this is a PKD story. Drugs are a possibility. Either his current predicament, or all his memories of his "real" life, could be some kind of drug induced hallucination. There is also the possibility of some kind of similar biochemical thing happening to him related to an alien lifeform that he interacts with, at a key moment very early in the story. There is also the possibility that there is something religious or metaphysical going on, something to do with a cruel, insane, or evil God figure that just wanted to fuck with Jason's head. PKD writes stories like that sometimes.

Also, the Jason character in this book is also supposed to be an enhanced superhuman in some way... he is called a "six," meaning that he is the result of the sixth round of some kind of scientific experiments that took place in the mid-1940s. It has something to do with some kind of eugenics experiment... I'm wondering if it is supposed to make readers think of some kind of unholy Joseph Mengele Nazi shit.

Anyway, there is no danger of my spoiling the ending, because I have not read it yet. PKD could still have some kind of total surprise up his sleeve, and make the ending into something that he hasn't even given any clues about, up to the point I'm at.

My point in this post was just originally supposed to be that I wonder if this story inspired the Jason Bourne character. Just the idea of a somehow-superior human waking up and having massive memory and identity problems of some kind. I wonder if Robert Ludlum could have read this book and liked it, and decided to un-PhilipKDick-ify it, and turn it into a spy/thriller story.

So. Anyway. Interesting stuff. Had to share.