Movie Review: Fahrenheit 451 (2018)
We've gotten a month-long subscription to HBO so Scott can mainline Westworld, but the first thing we actually did was watch Fahrenheit 451 starring Michael B. Jordan.
This version of Bradbury's classic is very much updated for our present political moment; not only is media consumption and drug use state-sanctioned, but so is social media/live news feeds. Takes place in some near-future after a Second Civil War has left 8 million dead and people are happily in thrall to limited knowledge. Resistance leads to loss of citizenship and vulnerability to state violence. So far, so too too familiar.
Clarice is transformed from an ingenue to a non-citizen who is creeped on by Michael Shannon's Beatty and loved by Jordan's Montag. She and Montag read Dostoyevsky in her shitty apartment and fall in love, and she eventually leads him to the other rebels who are also the living books themselves.
This leads to a significant plot deviation, one that I'm not sure works. In addition to memorizing books with each person taking on the identity of a book, they have also been scanning them and *handwave* encoding them in a strand of DNA called OMNIS that they inject into a bird. The climax is the bird flying to freedom across picturesque vistas and joining a giant flock as they weave beautiful pictures into the sunset, because the DNA can also move to other animals and humanity's knowledge will be preserved in the natural world while also being sent to Canada.
Except that was when Scott pointed out that if people were escaping to Canada anyway, what happened to Canada's books??
That aside, I can't say enough good things about Jordan and Shannon's acting. They did an exceptionally convincing job of friends/father-son relationship where genuine love is at war with obedience to state and self. Also they were slashy af and I kinda want to go looking for fic. >_>
This version of Bradbury's classic is very much updated for our present political moment; not only is media consumption and drug use state-sanctioned, but so is social media/live news feeds. Takes place in some near-future after a Second Civil War has left 8 million dead and people are happily in thrall to limited knowledge. Resistance leads to loss of citizenship and vulnerability to state violence. So far, so too too familiar.
Clarice is transformed from an ingenue to a non-citizen who is creeped on by Michael Shannon's Beatty and loved by Jordan's Montag. She and Montag read Dostoyevsky in her shitty apartment and fall in love, and she eventually leads him to the other rebels who are also the living books themselves.
This leads to a significant plot deviation, one that I'm not sure works. In addition to memorizing books with each person taking on the identity of a book, they have also been scanning them and *handwave* encoding them in a strand of DNA called OMNIS that they inject into a bird. The climax is the bird flying to freedom across picturesque vistas and joining a giant flock as they weave beautiful pictures into the sunset, because the DNA can also move to other animals and humanity's knowledge will be preserved in the natural world while also being sent to Canada.
Except that was when Scott pointed out that if people were escaping to Canada anyway, what happened to Canada's books??
That aside, I can't say enough good things about Jordan and Shannon's acting. They did an exceptionally convincing job of friends/father-son relationship where genuine love is at war with obedience to state and self. Also they were slashy af and I kinda want to go looking for fic. >_>