Fahrenheit 451

This was going to be bad.... The line " you dream of running from me, you wake up and apologize" (Or something like that) made me think that I didn't know if I could make it through this movie. Which is a shame because I really like both lead actors. Maybe the director just didn't direct them correctly but Ray Bradbury must be turning in his grave at this retelling. I've seen the movie Equilibrium which is loosely based on the book, and while it's no masterpiece it is boatloads better than this

...or blasphemy. or a too big mistake. and , after its end, the only question remains why Fahrenheit 451 must be the victim of an adaptation who use it only as pretext. because it is a bad MTV style movie. flames, few lines from books, flat performances ( for his Montag, Michael B. Jordan deserves Golden Raspberry Award) and Michael Shannon is refuged in the skin of military bad guy, using each clichee. short, a massacre of a masterpiece. chaotic, lost in incoherence, without any meaning , proposing no story and proof of the hate against books of director. because it has every piece for create a decent work. but , except the desire to propose few fake impressive images, a lot of kitsch and stupidity, nothing else.

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.

Though it was strong in a couple moments, for the most part I was disappointed with this, it really could ave been so much better, especially considering the immense resources of HBO. It goes back and forth between completely ridiculous to somewhat interesting. Unfortunately it is also a pale imitation to the novel its based on, only using the bare skeleton of the story, and not delving into what truly made the novel profound. Michael B. Jordan's character was so completely ridiculous and different than the novel version in the first 15 minutes that I nearly stopped watching it, but thankfully that subsides. There were many things from the book I expected to see, only to piss me off when they were either not there at all, or altered in some way for no justifiable reason. So while many of the basic plot points are there, tough some of them changed, it just didn't possess what the book did.

I did like Michael Shannon's character and his acting, and while Jordan's character is completely off-putting, it does get tolerable as the film goes on. There were a couple of meaningful discussions, but the essential meaning of the book burning is completely missed, it was to create a people void of free thought, and while that is hinted at, for the most part its nowhere near as deep and introspective as the novel, its a very basic rendering of and incredibly deep story. I for the most part was disappointed, it could have been so much better, all the had to do was pay attention to the source material, and not just scan over it. Also the re-writing of many of the characters is inconceivable to me, no idea why they would do it.

Meh... I didn't like it very much.

...I'll keep this brief.

Bradbury would not be happy with this film. Bradbury appreciators are not and never will be happy with this film. Where is Mildred? Where is Faber? Where is the Hound? Who tore the beating heart out of a fine parable and crushed it? What possessed them? When did they sell their souls to the devil? How did they manage to get Bradbury's or his estate's blessing for this cartoon? Why, oh, why was that blessing given?

This film embodies everything Bradbury warned us about.

"Lecture's over."