I found Francois Truffaut's film version of Fahrenheit 451 hard going, not helped by a distant performance from star Oskar Werner.
Ramin Bahrani reimagines the Ray Bradbury novel. He sets it in an era of fake news, fake history, disinformation. Propaganda at its best. Burn books and you can reinvent an alternative timeline.
Set in a future Dystopia, Guy Montag (Michael P Jordan) and his mentor Captain Beatty (Michael Shannon) are firemen after a second civil war America who burn books, a tradition that goes far back as Benjamin Franklin! It is easier to control people if they could not find information and think for themselves. It was easy to keep people happy if they do not get offended from what they read.
Montag carries out his work diligently and is in line for promotion but gets taken in by the Eels, a counter group who preserve the information contained in books. They learn books by heart, the upload it on the net, they rebel against the government.
Shannon can play the villain in his sleep. Jordan has the harder part but he is rather vacuous, maybe he is meant to be that way, a person who has never learned to think or question for himself.
There are some good ideas in this film but they never hang together or are fully realised. With two failed adaptations, I think Bradbury's novel might come across better on the page than on the screen.
Ramin Bahrani reimagines the Ray Bradbury novel. He sets it in an era of fake news, fake history, disinformation. Propaganda at its best. Burn books and you can reinvent an alternative timeline.
Set in a future Dystopia, Guy Montag (Michael P Jordan) and his mentor Captain Beatty (Michael Shannon) are firemen after a second civil war America who burn books, a tradition that goes far back as Benjamin Franklin! It is easier to control people if they could not find information and think for themselves. It was easy to keep people happy if they do not get offended from what they read.
Montag carries out his work diligently and is in line for promotion but gets taken in by the Eels, a counter group who preserve the information contained in books. They learn books by heart, the upload it on the net, they rebel against the government.
Shannon can play the villain in his sleep. Jordan has the harder part but he is rather vacuous, maybe he is meant to be that way, a person who has never learned to think or question for himself.
There are some good ideas in this film but they never hang together or are fully realised. With two failed adaptations, I think Bradbury's novel might come across better on the page than on the screen.