I saw Ray Bradbury give a speech once. The gist of it was that thinking is important, and anything the shows the magnificence of human achievement should be celebrated. I’ve also read Fahrenheit 451, his best known novel.
Now there’s a new TV version of it on HBO. How is it?
It’s actually so-so. Michael B. Jordan does his usual good job as Guy Montag, the fireman who starts fires instead of putting them out in order to burn books. He lives in a futuristic America where books, all books, are outlawed, either on paper on computer screen. In an interesting twist on the novel’s original idea, the movie also makes it clear that it isn’t just books that are outlawed. They also burn films, art, even sheet music. Great works of literature are reduced to a short paragraph made up of multiple emojis. As in the novel, Montag gets curious about the printed word and starts reading, and that stimulates thought.
Bradbury’s original work is fine on its own, and the fear Bradbury had wasn’t some sinister government trying to keep the peace at all costs but simply that people would voluntarily shut down their brains for superficial entertainment from the likes of television (or, perhaps, the Internet). That element is still here, but this movie adds more modern political themes about how this world came to be after a second Civil War, one that ended with the idea that ideas themselves were bad and caused chaos, anarchy, and unhappiness. People still toss ideas from old books around, but no one seems to know what they mean. As any idea that anyone would find offensive is gone, the society is more obsessed with celebrity (firemen are as much celebrities as public servants), online commentary, and…not much else. Michael Shannon plays yet another obsessive true believer, one who says that alternate ideas are fake facts, but really, the movie feels flat. Six and a half out of ten bad propaganda edits.
For a better, less bloated version with better writing, I recommend the 1966 version directed by Francois Truffaut.