![]() In some ways more so, as much of Bradbury’s vision has already come to pass with the internet and social media literally killing the print industry. Montag’s wife is excised from the telling, as are many of its subplots, but the sheer paranoia and indignation of a future distracted from reality is as potent as ever. HBO and Bahrani’s story is smaller, and at times too small. This Fahrenheit 451 is again a very different animal. Their solution, for now, is the stuff of sci-fi, but its appeal is real enough that Beatty will stop at nothing to burn them… even if his protégé becomes their de facto protector from the firefighter community. Clarisse warily helps Montag understand the book he was supposed to have burned, and aids his discovery of an underground community that is trying to find a way to save knowledge. Haunted by his inability to understand it, he even turns to a comely “eel” (a book lover who’s been cast out of society) named Clarisse (Sofia Boutella). Your grandchildren aren’t going to even understand what a book is.”īut as the bonfire starts, and the woman whose collection is the kindling chooses to burn with her world of words, something snaps in Montag and he steals a copy of Notes from Underground. Despite being practically raised by Beatty, Montag, who is every bit as introspective and anti-social as the good captain, has never seen a physical book when they discover the library of an elderly woman living outside their base city of Cleveland. That is until they find an actual honest to God book collection. Together they spend most of their time burning computers and hard drives storing works as varied as Jane Austen and Vladimir Nabokov. Jordan as Guy Montag, Beatty’s protégé and surrogate son. None are better at getting these books burned though than Michael Shannon as Capt. When working in this wheelhouse, Fahrenheit 451 is a chilling and thought-provoking retelling for peak TV premium cable, even if as a film, it never quite flies as high as a Phoenix should. Because this film is most certainly an attempted restaging of that 1953 book’s timeless warning of a world without knowledge for a 2018 land ruled by the Know Nothingness of Donald Trump a reborn vision of illiteracy in a time when knowledge is more accessible than ever, and yet “alternative facts” and “fake news” makes our society more distracted and ignorant. This faintly hopeful ribbon on an otherwise bleakly inescapable vision of dystopia is not repeated in HBO and Ramin Bahrani’s radically reimagined adaptation of Fahrenheit 451, but I suspect it was on Bahrani’s mind all the same. Tyranny and ignorance giving away to enlightenment and reconstruction. In essence, they ponder whether we, as a species, are like the famed Phoenix of myth-a legendary beast who will go through the cycle of self-immolation, destruction, and rebirth. There is a conversation near the end of Ray Bradbury’s original Fahrenheit 451 novel in which two characters discuss the quality of mankind through history.
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