Fahrenheit 451

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.

I've seen Truffaut's version from the 60's two or three times even if it wasn't perfect for a great admirer of the book but it had Oskar Werner and Julie Christie and Cyril Cusack and a phenomenal score by Bernard Herrmann. This 2018 version has an interesting production design but the the actual center of this warning tale is completely lost. The pacing is infuriating and Michael Shannon as good as he is, he's becoming the go to guy to play the bad guy. Here everything is on the nose and by the numbers. So, disappointed. Michael B Jordan has amazing eyes but I wish he can find a great actor's director. He certainly deserve it.

No wonder this movie has such horrible reviews. It's nothing like the book. Which is completely ridiculous given what book it is. The film is trash. I agree with previous posts: if you want to make your own thing, call it something different. Don't dare call it Farenheit 451. You've taken one of man's more beautiful creations and basterdized it. By creating this movie, the producers are in a way just as bad as the firemen in the book.

...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 teach Fahrenheit 451 in my Freshman English class, and I was so excited for this film to come out, but I was deeply disappointed by the final product. Bradbury is a brilliant writer, but the beauty of his language is completely lost in this poorly adapted script. The story is entirely changed and many of the key scenes are altered or removed altogether and the central messages are warped. Beatty lacks all complexity and Mildred and Faber aren't in the story at all. I expected so much more for this classic, but instead, I am left discouraged by the warping of a beautiful book.