Brave New World

What would Huxley think? His masterwork now fodder for the MTV culture of the world. It was interesting that the writer and director chose this particular style to shoot BNW from. Granted the cliche' of Hollywood and American culture in general may seem like a Huxleyian paradigm but really, here it seems a little pretentious, as if to make some vocal statement saying "America has finally caught up to the novel's vision." Oh brother! This almost cynical disregard for respecting the author's true vision of his own work is pretty sad, as every nuance of Huxley's story has its meaning and characters stomped upon with references to rave culture, soap opera scandal type revelations and media blitz culture. The video and vocal overlays that are supposed to drive us through the films locations....superfluous. THe concepts of life inside the Brave New World become so much pseudo intellectual rambilng, the characters merely philosophical mouthpieces. If I didn't know any better I would have thought this film was French in origin. One can almost sense a level of shame being heaped upon us, the viewers as if this is the world we want and the writer and director know what we WILL become in the future. How odd. This is the second movie I have seen based upon the novel, the first being the 1980 movie with Bud Cort and Marsha Strassman. Somehow they never seem to quite get it right, but this one missed the mark the furthest in my opinon. Definately skip this version.

In the near future society is managed so that everyone is happy - only a few live on the edges of society as trash. In society, babies are no longer born, they are designed into social categories to decide their future roles. Everyone is happy. However one of the conditioning team, Bernard, can't help but feel if there were any ways of making it better. When a chance helicopter accident brings him into contact with one of the `savages', John Cooper, he brings him back as an experiment. Initially John is taken by the society but gradually he begins to see that the world is not as he wants it.

For a major film to attempt to bring a major novel to the screen is a brave move, but for a cheap TVM to have a stab at it is even more of a risk. This version is kind of interesting in an obvious way, but really is not even worthy of sharing the name of the book (and indeed doesn't really stick to it either). The plot is roughly the same but the film is keen to point out how this future is so very like the current world that many of us in the West now live in. Big deal. This is very obvious and is far too simple a point to make in an attempt to translate Huxley. It is of vague interest on this level and there were certain parallels that made me think - problem was, I didn't leave the film thinking - I ignore the action onscreen and just starting pondering! Films should make you think - but surely not to the point where your thoughts are actually better than what's on the screen!

So yes it says lots of stuff about social classes (which we have - workers and middlemen and top men), consumerism, slogans, media saturation and loss of individualism. But it just doesn't deliver all these in a good package; which it really needed to do in order to get by. As it is, it doesn't manage to really engage and I found myself not really caring.

The cast are pretty low rent to a man - when Nimoy is a surprise big cameo, you know you're in the sh*t! Gallagher is pretty bland and didn't really do anything for me in the lead and support from Kihlstedt is not great either. The supposedly wild and free Cooper is played badly by Guinee; I just didn't care for him or his situation and never really got the feel of a man who is gradually realising that he is in hell. Ferrer was OK and it was nice to see him not playing a sinister creep of one sort or another (although only just!).

Overall this is a passable TVM that makes very obvious comments about our society by exaggerating them slightly in a future setting. This would be well and good but it is certainly never Brave New World. If you are looking for something to wash over you for 90 minutes then this would do, but given the choice again, I'd read the book instead.

'Brave New World', the 1932 novel by Aldous Huxley, told of a new world where babies were decanted as Alphas, Betas, Deltas, Epsilons, or Gammas, all designed to know their places in society, and in the case of the lower classes, decanted as multiple identical twins to staff entire factories and production lines. Their God is Ford (as in Henry) and their motto is 'history is bunk'.

In the book, Bernard Marx is a fish out of water, an Alpha of stunted growth who has dangerous ideas, who refuses to act like he is expected to, and is generally despised. The film's Bernard is Peter Gallagher, a kind of magnetic Romeo figure, popular with the girls, and a confident success. Already there's been some tampering done with the source.

With Rya Kihlstedt as a colourless Lenina (again nothing like the book's character, who is conventional to a 't') and Leonard Nimoy as the Controller, Mustapha Mond, the film loses impact and goes downhill very quickly.

Nods can be given (grudingly) at the attempts to develop computer generated conditioning forms, and to give some sense of a futuristic world. It just doesn't come off. The savage reservation is simply full of young Americans out to pick a fight, while John (the savage child of Linda, a Beta stranded in the reservation) does speak Shakespeare, but is otherwise of little interest and very unlike the book.

A disappointment and a huge bore, missing both the humour and the science-fiction/faction innovations of Huxley's novel.

This Hollywood makeover stylistically embodies many of the points made in the text; the victory of shallowness over sincerity, style over substance, sloganism over communication -- the movie is less than the book in so many of the ways that mankind is made less in the Brave New World. Coincidence? But who DOES read Shakespeare? Or for that matter, Huxley? If the movie were made true to it's original form, the intelligentsia would cheer and marvel just as they admired the original masterpiece, but what of those who need these insights the most? This movie reaches out to the brainwashed: the production / consumption units among us born and bred in the artifice of western civilization. Who needs these concepts more? Those who have already ascertained the game, muttering amongst themselves in coffee houses? Or those to whom the idea that this so-called reality is somehow "less" than the uncivilized world is a new idea and difficult to swallow . . . even in small bites? The American public is deeply asleep in a shared symbolic consciousness that obliterates the real. This movie eases the uninitiated into awareness through a television medium with which they are familiar and can relate. The characters, their motivations and dynamics have an air of familiarity in the TV world. It has the familiar hooks and subplots that would be expected in a quest for ratings, but is that all bad when it floats out at least some of the book's main ideas in a palatable form, diluting yet expanding Huxley's reach? The movie DOES make many valid and thoughtful statements that just don't get a lot of airplay in this society and deserves credit for making some bold statements - especially right before commercials.

I think the purists are being too harsh. This version of Brave New World reaches the most important audience - the uninitiated - in a way that's entertaining and understandable. It's a good start, and I recommend it as such.

The "Brave New World (TV Movie 1980)" from the BBC was a billion times better, you can find references to that adaptation in IMDb

Just watch the BBC version or read the book, there is nothing in this one to redeem itself, awful.

The 3 hours long BBC version and the book can be found in the website Huxley dot net at the very bottom, there are the links to the book and the movie Sadly the copy came from a bad VHS, but watchable. There is no better copy as far as I know. A bit cartooned in style, worth it anyway, so the book.

Bottom line, do yourself a favor, watch the BBC version or read the book