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In light of current events, one can easily see why Ray Bradbury ’s 1953 novel “Fahrenheit 451” felt ripe for a new adaptation. This is a story about a government that censors and bastardizes art it finds troublesome, while making ownership of the original, unexpurgated versions a treasonous crime. Any unapproved art, mostly books, are burned by a group of firemen led by Captain Beatty and his successor-in-waiting Guy Montag. While they hunt down the novel’s equivalent of “fake news,” most of the populace has been voluntarily anesthetized by mass media designed to give them exactly what they want.

François Truffaut took on this material in 1966, and now director Ramin Bahrani has created a 2018 adaptation for HBO. This version changes Bradbury’s older, unhappily married protagonist into a much younger and virile Michael B. Jordan and adds language far saltier than the “damns” and “hells” that once got the novel in trouble with censors. Bahrani and his co-writer Amir Naderi also attempt to update the story for today’s audiences. As a result, several plot points are either modified slightly or changed beyond recognition.

Fans of the novel may find these new additions to be blasphemous, but fealty to the source material is not a requirement in adaptations nor is it always welcome. However, this take on “Fahrenheit 451” has a bigger problem than its occasionally unsuccessful changes. For just as the evolution of television has weakened the satirical direction of Paddy Chayevsky’s “ Network ” by bending it toward documentary, so too has today’s political climate steered Bradbury’s science fiction ideas into the realm of the factual. Ironically, much of the novel’s shock value and allegorical power also feels weakened as a result.

“Stay Vivid on the Nine,” says the reporter whose visage is projected onto skyscrapers throughout a futuristic version of Cleveland. The Nine is a state-run combination of Twitter and a 24-hour news channel, with cascading emojis and text serving as real-time commentary on whatever topic is trending. It’s the only game in town; there doesn’t appear to be anything else to watch. The Nine also broadcasts book burnings and the arrests of the “eels” who have been hiding the doomed reading material. The stars of this particular program are Montag and his superior, Captain Beatty ( Michael Shannon ). They’re part of a group of powerful firemen who use flamethrowers to burn not only books but the homes of criminals found in possession of contraband.

Montag loves his job—and the publicity—until an old woman decides to self-immolate rather than go quietly while her library of books gets destroyed. Before she lights the match that ends her life, she mutters a word that appears to be code. The powers that be at The Nine change her final word to something more crowd-pleasing, though as someone points out, her lips don’t match the soundtrack. Montag is so shaken by the woman’s suicide that he steals a book so that he may understand why someone would die for it. Montag’s uncertainly increases when he falls into the orbit of Clarisse (Sofia Butella), a double agent who serves as both a snitch for Captain Beatty and one of the leaders of an underground book club big enough to rival Oprah’s.

Meanwhile, Captain Beatty has been writing phrases and ideas on small strips of paper he subsequently burns. The older Beatty has some familiarity with books and the time before they became banned. He tells Montag that books are full of non-existent characters whose ideas have the capability to upset people, harshing their mellow and interfering with the perpetual happiness that The Nine offers.

“Fahrenheit 451” points out that while the government passed the censorship laws, it was the people who clamored for them to be passed. This is a major idea that the film doesn’t really contemplate; the general public is represented solely by the aforementioned emojis that cover The Nine. If you’ve read the book or any of the writing Bradbury did regarding his novel, you’d know that the genesis of the idea that books bring unhappiness started with folks complaining about lack of representation or lackluster characterizations of minorities and women. Captain Beatty briefly alludes to this in a scene where he uses the N-word while explaining why people originally complained about a particular book. This premise is a sharp, pointed and potentially offensive one that warrants further interrogation, but this film is unwilling to cut too deeply.

As for the actors: Michael Shannon is well-cast here. He’s intimidating when he’s barking orders and does a fine job with his monologues. Despite having top billing (and a producer credit), Michael B. Jordan isn’t given a fully fleshed out character to play. We never really feel his dilemma nor his trauma. And his romance with Clarisse (who also isn’t fully realized) is as unwise as the film’s ridiculous usage of a bird with literature in its DNA. This is one of those additions that just doesn’t work. On the plus side, that bird figures in scenes with a group of book-remembering rebels led by the great Khandi Alexander .

I wish “Fahrenheit 451” had been as dynamic and fiery as its very effective opening credits sequence. Bahrani shoots extreme close-ups of book pages burning, their words and images contorting and exploding grotesquely across the screen. There’s a kinetic energy to it, a promise of something far more daring than we get. Despite boasting a darker fate for Montag than Bradbury envisioned, this version of “Fahrenheit 451” lacks the burning commentary that would justify why the filmmakers wanted to revisit this story in the first place. Just read the book, folks.

Odie Henderson

Odie "Odienator" Henderson has spent over 33 years working in Information Technology. He runs the blogs Big Media Vandalism and Tales of Odienary Madness. Read his answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire  here .

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Film credits.

Fahrenheit 451 (2018)

101 minutes

Michael B. Jordan as Guy Montag

Michael Shannon as Captain Beatty

Sofia Boutella as Clarisse McClellan

Laura Harrier as Millie Montag

Lilly Singh as Raven

Saad Siddiqui as Stone

Daniel Zolghadri as Clifford

Jane Moffat as Sam Sheppard

Andy McQueen as Gustavo

Grace Lynn Kung as Chairman Mao

Keir Dullea as Historian

• Ramin Bahrani

Writer (novel)

• Ray Bradbury
• Amir Naderi

Cinematographer

• Kramer Morgenthau
• Antony Partos
• Matteo Zingales

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Fahrenheit 451 Review: An Unsubtle Movie for Our Unsubtle Times

You could hardly dream up a more obvious candidate for a modern-day adaptation than Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 , which imagined a government that screamed "fake news" at anything approaching the truth all the way back in 1953.

And HBO’s new film adaptation—directed by Ramin Bahrani, and starring Michael B. Jordan and Michael Shannon—certainly looked like a sure thing. We live in unsubtle, maddening times, with a president who hates real journalism as much as he hates reading. If there’s any truth to be found in Fahrenheit 451 ’s overripe, melodramatic dystopia, it’s that many things that used to seem ridiculous and implausible are starting to look routine.

But all the disturbing aspects of modern-day America can’t account for the oddities of this heavy-handed, unenlightening Fahrenheit 451 adaptation, which places a heavy emphasis on book-burning at a time when physical books are just one of many ways to consume literature. This Fahrenheit 451 adaptation had a somewhat troubled gestation; you have the sense that the team behind the movie desperately wanted to say something about our era but couldn’t quite figure out what they actually wanted to say.

Unlike in the novel (in which his wife plays a major role), protagonist Guy Montag (Jordan) lives alone—all the better to appeal to his legions of adoring fans, who follow his book-burning exploits on social media. In an update to the novel that straddles the line between clever and ridiculous, Fahrenheit 451 suggests that a despotic government might cast these brash, flashy young "firemen" as social-media stars. After blasting a pile of classic novels with a flamethrower, Montag shouts, "Damn, it’s a pleasure to burn!" and flashes a dazzling smile to his adoring online followers, who dutifully reply with smiley-face and heart emojis.

This is the world of HBO’s Fahrenheit 451 —a world in which books have been outlawed in favor of The Nine, a government-run Internet service that peddles false information and censored versions of famous novels. Firemen are government employees who are tasked with hunting down rebels, called "Eels," who hoard paper books and reject the government-mandated diet of eyedrop drugs and state propaganda. Montag is a rising star amongst these firemen, serving under the tutelage of his captain and surrogate father Beatty (Shannon). But when Montag smuggles a book and decides to read it for himself, he starts to figure out that his simplistic worldview is basically one hundred percent bullshit.

Fahrenheit 451 ’s dystopian world is extreme, but the movie clearly wants us to recognize our own world in the seeds of it. "We did it to ourselves. We demanded a world like this," says the rebel Clarisse (Sofia Boutella), who helps to facilitate Montag’s rehabilitation. Every house and apartment seems to be outfitted with a Yuxie—an Alexa-esque device that, shock of shocks, also doubles as an efficient way for the government to monitor its citizens. "If you see something, say something," says the omnipresent warnings lining the streets. And Beatty describes a time in the recent past when people settled for reading algorithmically generated headlines instead of the articles below them. Does that sound like an unrecognizably radical dystopia to you?

Maybe that’s why Fahrenheit 451 ’s future vision of Cleveland is ultimately unconvincing—a shadowy pastiche of cinematic dystopias you’ve seen before, from 1984 to Blade Runner . (Doesn’t it annoy people that these bright skyscrapers and billboards are loudly blasting government propaganda at all hours of the night?) Fahrenheit 451 might make its case more eloquently if it didn’t make it so forcefully. Neon skyscrapers and sterile, shadowy apartments might look impressive—but they also create a disconnect between the world they depict and the world we occupy. A Fahrenheit 451 set in a more banal, more recognizable Cleveland would be all the more chilling for it.

It’s hard to even begin to summarize the movie’s needlessly convoluted plot, which modernizes and adds several new twists and turns to Bradbury’s novel. Part of the problem is that the movie limits our information, which replicates the experience of living in this dystopia but raises many unanswered questions about what’s happening outside it. The stakes, which are never all that clear to begin with, seem to shift from scene to scene—particularly when you learn the dark truth about Montag’s childhood, which is so groaningly by-the-numbers that I’ll bet you can guess it right now. And the climax of the movie hinges on whether or not the rebels can smuggle a bunch of digital books out of the country, via a ridiculous vessel I would spoil here if it wasn’t so unbelievably dumb.

And that’s why—despite appearances to the contrary— Fahrenheit 451 is ultimately an optimistic dystopian story. Its final argument is that knowledge can’t be suppressed; there will always be people to defend it and people who will discover it, crave more of it, and ultimately be changed by their exposure to it. That’s a fine message for audiences, in 2018 or any other time. It would just be better if it had a better movie attached to it.

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‘fahrenheit 451’: film review | cannes 2018.

Ramin Bahrani's adaptation of Ray Bradbury classic 'Fahrenheit 451' stars Michael B. Jordan and Michael Shannon and will air on HBO.

By Todd McCarthy

Todd McCarthy

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This new Fahrenheit 451 is a flame-out. Ray Bradbury’s 1953 speculative fiction novel audaciously anticipated a world in which large home screens have replaced written matter in society to the extent that books are banned and burned. The fact that nearly everyone now carries a small screen around with them in addition to having a big one in their homes paradoxically makes this new adaptation both more relevant and less scary than the story seemed before. After a potent start, director/co-writer Ramin Bahrani ’s updated take on Bradbury’s cautionary tale becomes less credible as it develops and ultimately suffers from some fundamental creative missteps that leave it unconvincing in the final stretch. World premiering in a midnight slot at the Cannes Film Festival , this HBO production wouldn’t have cut it as a theatrical release even with the popular Michael B. Jordan ( Black Panther ) in the leading role of the rebel fireman.

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When Bradbury’s keenly farsighted book was published, televisions had just become commonplace additions to American homes and the specter of thought control was something exclusively associated with totalitarian regimes. But, as fire-lighting Captain Beatty ( Michael Shannon ) puts it, turning a fundamental American principle on its head, “We are not born equal, so we must be made equal by the fire, so that we can be happy.”

Release date: May 19, 2018

This anaesthetizing principle in the cause of social parity lies at the heart of Bradbury’s tale, which the author himself significantly revised more than once for stage and other adaptations. What Bahrani and his co-writer Amir Naderi have done, not surprisingly given our era, is to turn at least the first act into a macho, kick-ass actioner in which Beatty and his most talented fireman, Jordan’s Montag, are akin to sports stars, their exploits celebrated on giant screens on the sides of gleaming skyscrapers for an adoring public.

This new American society, which is the result of a mentioned but unexplained second civil war, is not entirely writing-free; government-approved slogans, the equivalent of ad copy, are prominently posted and three books —  Moby-Dick, The Bible and To the Lighthouse  — are still permitted. But Beatty makes a promise to a group of youngsters: “By the time you guys grow up, there won’t be one book left.” The sleek production and costume design make the world on view look quite like today, with a few spiffy adornments.

There is, of course, a resistance, a scruffy lot who hide books in walls and elsewhere and also download texts for preservation purposes. One of these is the dissolute, punky-looking Clarisse (Sofia Boutella), who has turned spy for Beatty in exchange for a shortened sentence in deprived exile. She tips him off to a huge secret library, but even as Beatty goes about his business, a certain oddness emerges: He tells Montag to read Kafka and he himself surreptitiously scribbles peculiar notes to himself on cigarette papers.

The ambiguity of Beatty and the conversion of Montag is where this Fahrenheit cools off. The boss’s dirty little secret seems like just that, a private perversion he’s always managed to keep to himself and not allow to affect his professional life. But as Montag is the real protagonist here, his about-face has to feel convincing and profoundly motivated. The book that supposedly changes his life is Dostoevsky’s anti-utopian Notes From Underground. But the unlikelihood that a basic non-reader would be able consume and digest such a dense and challenging work is compounded by the problem that this Montag never subsequently explains what he learned from it that turned his head around.

From this point on, Montag mostly stands around not knowing what to say or do about much of anything, including Clarisse, with whom there’s no real spark and whose character is basically a plot device here. Struck by conflicting feelings when he confiscates a Braille book from a blind person, Montag is ultimately traumatized into action after he witnesses an old lady choosing to go up in flames with her books rather than save herself, but his transformation is never truly convincing. This is Jordan’s first performance in which he seems rather at a loss over how to connect with or put across his character.

Coming on the heels of his turn as a nasty authority figure in another high-end sci-fi outing, the estimable The Shape of Water, Shannon also looks a bit like he’s treading water here; he definitely needs a couple of good, non-creepy change-of-pace roles at this point. 

In line with the template of most contemporary cinema, this new Fahrenheit 451 has been turned into as much of an action film as possible, including the final stretch. As flawed as it was, Francois Truffaut’s 1966 screen version of the novel concluded with the hauntingly beautiful scene of a small society of book people walking through a forest in a light snow as they recited the books they had committed to memory. Crucially, a palpable feeling of love of literature emanated from the film.

Furthermore, for all the changes Bahrani and his team have wrought in the material, they have strangely diluted the urgency of the rebellion against book burning by noting, in line with television’s ongoing The Handmaid’s Tale, that there’s no book burning in Canada (and presumably elsewhere); the anti-intellectual drive seems to be strictly an American thing. As disturbing as the forecast for American life and politics may be in Fahrenheit 451, this wrinkle nonetheless serves to seriously diminish the absolute need to preserve texts when they’re known to still exist elsewhere; when America gets its head on straight again, there is backup to resupply the intellectually deprived.

Good production values are led by Kramer Morganthau’s darkly burnished cinematography and an arresting electronic score from Matteo Zingales and Antony Partos.

Production companies: Brace Cove, Noruz Films, Outlier Society Cast: Michael B. Jordan, Michael Shannon, Sofia Boutella, Lilly Singh, Khandi Alexander, Keir Dullea, Dylan Taylor, Martin Donovan Director: Ramin Bahrani Screenwriters: Ramin Bahrani, Amir Naderi, based on the novel by Ray Bradbury Executive producers: Sarah Green, Ramin Bahrani, Michael B. Jordan, Alan Gasmer, Peter Jaysen Director of photography: Kramer Morgenthau Production designer: Mark Digbt Costume designer: Meghan Kasperlik Editor: Alex Hall Music: Matteo Zingales, Antony Partos Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Midnight)

Premieres: Sat., May 19, 8 p.m. ET/PT ( HBO )

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TV Review: ‘Fahrenheit 451’

By Kevin O'Keefe

Kevin O'Keefe

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Can an adaptation of a 65-year-old book feel too futuristic? That’s the dilemma that HBO’s “ Fahrenheit 451 ” TV movie, directed and adapted by “99 Homes'” Ramin Bahrani, presents to us.

On the one hand, much of the world it presents is familiar, especially to those who read Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel. The core story is there: Guy Montag ( Michael B. Jordan ) works as a fireman in a dystopian future where, instead of putting out fires, he starts them. He, alongside a team led by Captain Beatty (Michael Shannon), seeks to find remaining books and scraps of literature in the country, and burn them in a spectacle of fire. The fires are broadcast to the citizens, who watch and cheer as the written word is destroyed.

Guy, as our protagonist, grows increasingly skeptical of this, and an encounter with a book-hoarding woman who burns herself alive leaves him questioning everything. Assisted by a passionate informant, Clarisse (Sofia Boutella), Guy takes aim at the fire department and the government in an attempt to stop the erasure of history.

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But beyond the shared plot, much of Bahrani’s adaptation is designed to make this world feel separate from our own. Several Newspeak-esque terms have been created: Members of the rebellion are “eels.” Their attempt to save world literature and artwork is through something called the “OMNIS.” Their opponents are not just known as the government, but the “ministry.” All modern communication takes place on “the Nine,” where people can watch book burnings live and read emoji-fied versions of the Bible and “Moby Dick.”

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The result is a version of “Fahrenheit 451” made for the “Hunger Games” era. In contemporary films, dystopia is regarded almost exclusively as heavily technological. Odd, invented terminology only makes this new world feel foreign. You can hear similar terminology in franchises like “The Maze Runner” (“Gladers,” “WCKD”) and “Divergent” (“Factionless,” “Dauntless”).

But unlike those properties, “Fahrenheit 451” desperately wants to connect our present to its own future. An eel bemoans how books became less popular when “nobody was reading anymore — they were just glancing at the headlines.” In other words, this world is not as far away from our modern times as we think. But then why create such distance with the strange terminology? Hulu’s adaptation of “The Handmaid’s Tale” does this, too, but closes the gap with flashbacks that show just how Gilead came to power. All we hear in “Fahrenheit 451” is references to a Second Civil War that left 8 million dead. Details of how the ministry rose from the ashes are scarce.

Jordan is the saving grace of this TV movie, breaking out a flashy, villainous veneer for the book-burning scenes, then scaling back to his raw humanity during quiet moments. Between this and his “Black Panther” performance as antagonist Killmonger, the actor is quickly becoming top of his craft at sculpting sympathetic, anti-heroic men.

Shannon, whom Bahrani directed to a truly fantastic performance in “99 Homes,” is less impactful here. As he was in Guillermo Del Toro’s Oscar-winning “The Shape of Water,” Shannon is too much snarl, not enough human as Beatty. His role, beyond opposing Guy, is to present most of the pro-burning ideas in the film. During one scene, he points out that racist literature died with the burnings, a fact that seemingly resonates with Guy.

“We are not born equal, so we must be made equal by the fire,” Beatty says. It’s a line that would likely land better were Shannon not delivering it like a threat.

It’s tough to determine whether something changed about Shannon as an actor, or if he just hits the same notes too often, and it’s tiresome to watch over and over. He’s at his most compelling when he takes his typical growl and gives it some genuine humanity, as he did in the otherwise-abrasive “Nocturnal Animals.” Generally speaking, Shannon’s best performances come when he’s not the loudest actor in the room.

Here, however, Shannon is loud and proud, and it makes what is effectively a duet of a film something of a slog. Less time with Beatty might have been better spent with the ensemble cast, many of whom shine in smaller moments (Khandi Alexander especially, as one of the eels whom Guy works with in the film’s second half).

There’s enough good, though, especially in Jordan’s performance, to recommend “Fahrenheit 451,” but it’s not the slam-dunk you’d expect of a prestigious adaptation of a great American novel. The end result, with all its eels and OMNIS and emojis, is just too affected — and indeed, somehow too futuristic.

TV Review: ‘Fahrenheit 451’  TV movie: HBO, Tues. May. 19, 8 p.m.   

• Crew: CREW: Directed by Ramin Bahrani; produced by David Coatsworth; screenplay by Ramin Bahrani. CAST:  Michael B. Jordan, Michael Shannon, Khandi Alexander, Sofia Boutella, Lilly Singh, Laura Harrier, Martin Donovan, Andy McQueen, Dylan Taylor, Grace Lynn Kung, Keir Dullea.

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HBO's Fahrenheit 451 Review

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Book to TV Adaptations We Can't Wait to Watch

Fahrenheit 451 features strong performances and a dancing, flickering visual flare, but all that's not enough to cover up the clunkiness of the script and the strain of reconfiguring this always relevant - yet still very 1950s - story to fit within our 2018 specifics.

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Movie Review – Fahrenheit 451 (2018)

August 1, 2018 by admin

Fahrenheit 451 , 2018.

Directed by Ramin Bahrani. Starring Michael B. Jordan, Michael Shannon, Sofia Boutella, Lilly Singh, Khandi Alexander, Mayko Nguyen, and Dylan Taylor.

In a dystopian future America, firemen don’t put out fires but start them by burning books.

Fahrenheit 451 starts out promisingly. The two leads engage in a stimulating boxing match promising a powerful confrontation in the finale. Instead, the movie turns into a black-and-white morality tale with so-so action scenes and below-average special effects. Aside from a handful of startling scenes, the movie never manages to communicate the dread and fear of the original source material.

Based on the novel of the same name, Fahrenheit 451 has Guy Montag (Michael B. Jordan) experience doubts about his vocation in turning Joyce and the Bible into ashes. Guy is a fireman but in this alternative future firemen don’t put out fires but create them to destroy books. While there are broad similarities between the book and movie, Bahrani makes some crucial changes. Some have minor stylistic consequences such as the profusion of emojis dotting the screen. But other changes that appear small have radical consequences and end up being fatal to the narrative.

In the novel, Guy had a wife but strikes up a friendship with a young and attractive woman, Clarisse McClellan (played here by Sofia Boutella). Whatever the sexual biases in the novel, Guy’s attraction, at least, gave the story a narrative logic the movie lacks. Jordan’s version of Guy is a hazy mess of motivations.

We have some flash backs that hint Guy’s father was assasinated by this futuristic police state but the the viewer is likely to be more confused than enlightened as to why Guy became a fireman – or inexplicably shouts his dialogue repeatedly. Jordan and Boutella make an attractive enough couple but Boutella’s Clarrisse is closer to a walking exposition-machine than an organic character. Not that her exposition helps much at all.

What explanations are given are hopelessly self-contradictory. Books were declared illegal because they made people unhappy; there is also talk of a “Second” Civil War that necessitated the present authoritarian regime but Bahrani fails to explain much. There are clever touches to be sure. Benjamin Franklin was a fireman in his own day burning books – which is rather strange because if fireman have existed for hundreds of years how did all those paperback Penguin books people illegally keep (with translations!) manage to get published? Before that logical problem is allowed to set in, however, Bahrani makes a truly fatal decision beyond the odd Boutella-Jordan pairing that undermines the movie greatly.

In this future, unlike the novel, firemen are not just government officials but media celebrities. The burning of books is taped and Guy has a social media profile. This might be a clever move except it leads to numerous problems. If Guy is such a popular celebrity why are no celebrity photographers shadowing him? Why is he alone instead of fighting off numerous female fans? Why if the burnings are being televised live is Guy’s suspected loyalty take so long to be caught? Science fiction films by their nature will always have problems of logic in trying to present an alternative world but Bahrani’s imagining is self-contradictory to a fault.

Guy’s boss and father figure, Captain Beatty (Michael Shannon) spews the fascist rhetoric of the new order with conviction as to why the firemen of this future do what they do: “If you don’t want a person to be unhappy, don’t give them two sides of a question to worry about.” Even as a bad science film premise this makes no sense; a person unhappy even in a world without books. Music can make someone unhappy. Has music been banned in this alternate reality? Of course not. Happiness is certainly a ripe topic for dystopia but since Shannon appears sad in several scenes one wonders how seriously this is meant as a theme.

Still Shannon does communicate some – though not enough – brooding charm and his black, fascistic uniform is a powerful symbol. But Jordan’s charisma, Shannon’s committed performance, and an interesting cameo by Khandi Alexander just aren’t enough to salvage the movie from its poor production design and muddled dialogue.

Bahrani is talented and aiming for large subjects. Not just fascism but celebrity culture, racism, police brutality, hysteria over immigrants, and crowd psychology are being referenced. The movie is both too obvious and too obscure. We never quite understand why Guy makes the leap from disillusioned fascist to joining the resistance (called “eels” for illegals).

The odd tonal shifts also create unexpected responses. Two scenes in particular are extremely funny; one of them being a woman about to self-immolate, which was clearly not intended as comedy. In the end, for a movie about books being burned, the focus is puzzlingly on firemen confiscating hard-drives and re-editing news footage. The Ray Bradbury novel may not have been great but it honed in on the evils of television, this adaptation seems a grab-bag diatribe about all kinds of electronic technology.

Once or twice, Bahrani does give us some arresting images of the book themselves being consumed in flames. But, for the most part, the burning of books (and people) soon becomes tedious. We never feel or care about what would be lost in this what-if world.

Bahrani clearly intends the movie to stand in the company of great sci-fis such as The Day the Earth Stood Still , A Clockwork Orange , and Ex Machina . The problem is that Kubrick even while arguing for free will made fascism, partly, genuinely attractive. But Bahrani never goes as far as making the act of burning books intoxicating creating a movie closer to an intellectual version of the Alex Proyas’s I, Robot than an update of Kubrick or Bradbury.

If the movie is going to truly work though it must enter this ugly territory a la Fight Club where we, at least, momentarily want to be firemen instead of beating the audience over the head with obvious video clips of Hitler and Nazis burning books. This is a movie with great ambitions and noble intentions but sadly lacks the storytelling heft to be the wake-up critique about our media-obsessed culture it desperately wants to be.

Flickering Myth Rating  – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★

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A Movie Review of HBO’s Fahrenheit 451 from a High School English Teacher

Finally… the moment my students and I have been wishing and waiting for – an updated movie remake of one of our favorite novels: Fahrenheit 451 .  We always have a little fun playing the role of director, choosing which of our favorite actors and actresses should play Montag, Beatty, Mildred, Clarisse, and all the other memorable characters.  However, we do always wonder…  would Bradbury actually approve of any screen adaptation of his magnum opus ?  I had so many questions before watching HBO’s hot, new adaptation: Who would play Montag?  Would it capture the theme accurately? What would be removed or added? And most importantly… would it be a good fit for using in class?  Keep reading for the answers. WARNING: There are spoilers.

1) Characters/Characterization : Not everything about the characters was 100% spot on, but that is to be expected, I suppose.  So what works and what doesn’t?

• Beatty –  Captain Beatty is our resident manipulative, maniacal manager of the fire. He’s the villain through and through, loving to control the narrative and burn anything that gets in his way.  Right. Right? Well, maybe not.  Beatty’s ambiguity is what makes him so compelling, confusing, and complex.  In my opinion, the film does a nice job of painting a picture of Beatty of which Bradbury would approve.

• Faber/Granger – These fiction-loving fellas aren’t named characters in the film, but their archetype is certainly present.  In fact, they play a huge role in the film in terms of propelling the conflict.  In the novel, the bulk of the conflict is driven by Montag’s internal struggle, but the film really hinges on both the person v. person and person v. society conflict with the “Eels” to move the plot. I suppose that’s a pretty decent substitution.
• Montag –  I’m not sure anybody can really live up to our Guy Montag.  He’s always the hardest one to pinpoint and agree upon when we do our exercise in class of picking the actors/actresses.  Everyone just always has a different idea of who he should be.  He fumbles through most of the book trying to figure himself out, so maybe that’s why he is so hard to pinpoint.   HBO’s Montag experiences a similar struggle, but I am still not quite satisfied for some reason. Montag the confused – yes, I can get on board with that.  Montag the superstar – nah, I’ll pass on that interpretation.  Maybe my hopes were too high. That said, I would give Michael B. Jordan a B+.
• Ms. Blake – What a powerful scene. Glad she – and it – was included. Enough said.

• Mildred –  Initially, I was bothered by the fact that Mildred wasn’t included.  The more I think on it, though, I can accept the choice.  In the movie, she wasn’t just an obsessed robotic tv watcher, she WAS the robot.  Clever.  In the text, Bradbury needed a vessel to paint the picture society’s bad behaviors, etc.  On the big screen and with today’s special effects, it is possible to just make it evident in other ways.  Figuratively, too, it speaks to the whole idea of how little she actually contributed anything to Montag or society at all and how truly forgettable she was. Gone like a freight train (puns are intended), gone like yesterday. Wait, who was Millie again?
• Clarisse – Clarisse provides the most mystery in the book, and the kids always love her.  Bradbury is even quoted as saying he is Clarisse in the book: full of wonder and curiosity.  It’s with Clarisse that the film falls of the wagon in the characters/characterization category.  Clarisse is supposed to be light and airy and a picture of innocence, but in the film, she is too dark and brooding for my liking. And then there’s the whole spark between Montag and Clarisse.   Not. My. Favorite.  My students always think they’ve “picked up” on something between Montag and Clarisse when they read the scenes with her, and I always stress how incorrect that reading is. Clarisse is a catalyst for Montag’s path toward the truth. In that that way – and only in that way – might she serve as a femme fatale, luring him to the light.  Am I surprised “Hollywood” used her character as a way to provide some on-screen romance? No, but it’s just textually inaccurate. As an aside here: My students didn’t like her in the film either.

2) Setting :  So much of what Bradbury penned was futuristic – and dare I say prophetic – in the 1950s.  Today, though, just about every bit of it has come to fruition, and what hasn’t can be computer generated for the movies.   I was pleased to see the infusion of the large screens; they are, in fact, everywhere: in homes, in streets, and even on the skyscrapers.  Bradbury’s biggest fear was the detrimental effects of people’s over consumption of and obsession with television. The TVs are ever present and “large and in charge.”  However, I’m not so certain the intended dystopian city that Bradbury envisioned really seemed “all that bad” in HBO’s version.   The setting, for me, kinda fizzled out.

3) OMNIS : This is a massive change from the book, but it may just be this detail that shows us – 2018 watchers of the film – how close we might actually be to Bradbury’s dystopian future.  OMNIS holds every piece of literature, art, and history in a DNA strand, preserving the long forgotten culture that the firemen tried to erase.  While there are underground members of society, like Granger and his “railroad” crew that memorize entire books in order to preserve them, it is this OMNIS that they work to protect and preserve. Once the OMNIS is introduced into the plot, it becomes the major source of the conflict, as it is the focus of the firemen’s revenge.  The twist is that this DNA strand has been implanted in a bird.  After some thought, I decided I might be satisfied with this change as I see connections with it and the prominent role of the Phoenix in the novel.   OMNIS becomes a symbol of hope in a bleak, literature-loathing society that hints at the emergence of a better future. It’s a reminder that it doesn’t matter how much “graffiti” (books) the firemen decide to burn, there’s still hope out there for a free-thinking future — much like the Phoenix that is burned but rises again.

4) Theme : Ultimately, Bradbury wants readers to put themselves in the characters’ shoes: What role would you have played in this dystopian universe: perpetuator, bystander, fighter? Would you see the truth like Montag, or continue to fumble your way through the pursuit for emptiness happiness like Mildred. Would you fight to manipulate and cover the truth like Beatty or use truth to lead others to it like Faber or Granger?  It is the growth from within that he wants – that really can bring the change that this culture needs. Truth, knowledge, morality — all erased and replaced with what people see rather than what they think.  The movie does a good job of making that clear — maybe a little too clear (some points didn’t leave much to the imagination), but in order to bridge the gap to “modern audiences,” I can see the need.  Maybe that’s a tad ironic, and telling, in and of itself.  Nonetheless, tons of lines from the book are woven throughout, and I enjoyed hearing Bradbury’s voice.

5) The Ending : Bradbury’s ending is open, or so many of my students say, and most really do hate that.  I always pose the question to them, though, Is it really open ended ? Throughout the entire book, Bradbury wants readers to realize that the value of books is to provide information, but more importantly to make people think.  On one hand, the open ending forces readers to do that. On the other hand, maybe the ending so open at all. Montag did figure out his purpose, and if you read it that way, then what else was there?  Either way, the movie definitely provides us with Bahrani’s idea of what he thought should be Montag’s purpose: keep the “books” alive.  But die?  I could see a case for his death in the book, but die at the hand of Beatty.  That idea should be torched.  In the movie, the books “rise from the ashes” to live on and that offers some hope, but having Beatty kill Montag gives the villain way too much power, and erases hope that the books — and future — will really be safe.   To link in another once “hot” film, President Snow said, “Hope, it is the only thing stronger than fear.  A little hope is effective, a lot of hope is dangerous. A spark is fine, as long as it’s contained.” (Sidebar: Does anybody else see the HG connections? I can’t unsee it.)  If Bahrani intended to remove that hope, that’s dark and maybe it’s a little too dark.  But perhaps that’s just me trying to look on the bright side.

Final thoughts: Is it appropriate for class?  HBO rated the film TV-MA for violence and language.  That said, just about any novel we pick up is going to have violence and language or worse.  I am not a fan of it either, and I don’t want to convey that at all.   Otherwise, it’s pretty benign. All in all, I did think it was time well spent showing it to my students. It brought up so many conversations; and we really did decide that the book is better.  It doesn’t get much better for my little English-teacher heart.  In my school, anytime we show a film, we have to get our principal to approve it.  So, I did that, and I wrote a parent letter and created a set of questions student would answer during the viewing.  He was fine with that, and I had zero parents ask for an alternative assignment.  I do have older students, but if you cover your bases this way you should be fine.  (See my Teacher Talk Video on Facebook here about dealing with novels with difficult content .)

  Get the letter I drafted and the questions HERE for free !

If you teach Fahrenheit 451 as a novel unit, stop over to my teacherspayteachers store and take a look at my complete unit plan . Also, did you enjoy the memes above? I have to brag on my students. Those were all their original work, and I have to admit, I laughed out loud at most of them.

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‘Fahrenheit 451’ Film Review: Michael B. Jordan Remakes Ray Bradbury for the Age of Fake News

Cannes 2018: Ramin Bahrani directed a new adaptation starring Michael Shannon

Most people who see Ramin Bahrani’s “Fahrenheit 451,” which had a midnight screening at the Cannes Film Festival on Saturday and comes to HBO on May 19, will probably think of it as a new adaptation of the classic science-fiction novel by Ray Bradbury, who posited a future in which books were outlawed and the job of a fireman was to burn them.

But in Cannes, there’s another strong association, because an earlier film based on Bradbury’s book was directed by legendary French director Francois Truffaut, whose only English-language film was a 1966 version starring Oskar Werner and Julie Christie.

So Bahrani, the director of “99 Homes” and “Chop Shop,” comes to the Croisette having to measure up to two formidable artists — a task he approaches by doing his best to ignore Truffaut and give glancing service to Bradbury.

Bahrani’s “Fahrenheit 451” is more high-tech than Truffaut’s, of course, and far more violent. It jettisons big portions of Bradbury’s story to zero in on one relationship, and adds a shoot-’em-out finale miles away in tone from the novelist’s more contemplative coda. (To be fair, that coda followed the nuking of a city, so the author hardly eschewed violence.)

It works, to a degree, though largely as a showcase for a battle between Michael B. Jordan and Michael Shannon. The former plays Guy Montag, a gung-ho fireman primed for a promotion and seemingly eager to be the brash hero of every book-burning for the mindless masses who watch his exploits on 24-hour-a-day reality TV (or is it fake news?) projected on the side of the skyscrapers in the unnamed future metropolis.

Shannon is Captain Beatty, Montag’s boss, whose quintessential Shannonesque villainy is slightly undercut by the fact that he seems to have read a lot of the books he burns, and can eloquently explain that they contradict each other and would just confuse regular people.

Those people are kept in a state of perpetual vacuity by state news and by “The 9,” this film’s version of the internet, albeit an internet designed to dumb down everybody who uses it — which is to say, everybody.

In Bradbury’s book and Truffaut’s film, the misguided masses were epitomized by Montag’s wife, Millie, who’s been so techno-lobotomized that she can’t even remember her suicide attempt the morning after. Bahrani filmed Millie’s scenes, with actress Laura Harrier in the role, but they wound up on the cutting-room floor; in this “Fahrenheit 451,” the mindless masses are barely seen and Montag is a bachelor, all the better to hasten his showdown with Captain Beatty.

That showdown comes when Montag, spurred by a few conversations with a mysterious young woman who informs for Beatty but also has ties to the resistance, and shaken by an old woman who incinerates herself rather than watch her illicit library burn, begins to think that books just might be better for, you know, reading instead of burning.

He swipes a copy of Dostoyevsky’s “Notes From the Underground” (in Bradbury’s telling, it was the Bible) and starts having the kind of doubts we knew were inevitable from the moment Jordan strutted and grinned like the world’s most enthusiastic fireman in his early scenes.

Bahrani’s “Fahrenheit” has its topical touches, with clear nods to today’s anti-immigrant crusades in the way people are separated into “natives” and “eels” — i.e., good citizens who do what the government tells them and outsiders who don’t. But despite the timeliness, and the spectacle of all those gleaming high-rise towers serving as giant TV screens, the film sometimes seems as besotted with the shiny images as Montag initially is with the flames he unleashes.

Bradbury and Truffaut both had more humane, more human takes on the material, and maybe more love for the power of the words that Montag ends up trying to save rather than burn.

This version of the story turns into a chase of sorts, and places the real key to humanity’s future not in the memories of a colony of people who’ve memorized entire books, but the DNA of a bird who’s been programmed with all human knowledge. (The book people are here, but they’re expendable; it’s the bird who’s got to be saved at all costs.)

Jordan and Shannon, though, make suitably fierce competitors. And in an era where inconvenient truths are branded as fake, any take on Bradbury’s cautionary tale can’t help but be resonant, and worth seeing.

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Why is HBO's Fahrenheit 451  so bad?

Fahrenheit 451 should’ve been a home run.

The HBO film (airing Saturday at 8 p.m. ET) has great source material, adapted from Ray Bradbury’s anti-intellectual dystopian classic. It’s written and directed by Ramin Bahrani, the essential American indie filmmaker behind Man Push Cart and Chop Shop . The leading man is Black Panther star Michael B. Jordan , one of Hollywood’s most exciting actors, the kind of fiery presence who can steal a superhero movie from its superhero (or a Rocky movie from Rocky.) He’s surrounded by a fine cast: Michael Shannon, Sofia Boutella, Khandi Alexander.

Even the best people make bad films, but what’s disappointing is that such a coalition of talent has produced a film this inconsequential.

Certainly, the basic concept remains important 65 years after the book’s publication. In a dark future, a man named Guy Montag (Jordan) is employed as a “fireman.” But he’s fanning, not extinguishing. The central government has declared books illegal. The printed page is now “graffiti,” and owning any book is a capital offense. Guy and Captain Beatty (Shannon) stormtroop their way through a futuristic Cleveland, gleefully incinerating every book they find.

One obvious foundational problem comes to mind: Bradbury wrote his book when the printed page was still sacred, a lost world before computers and e-books. In his adaptation, Bahrani has tried hard to modernize Fahrenheit , but every element of this modernization is unconvincing to the point of ruin. In the film, society obsesses over a version of the internet called “The Nine,” and Guy is a kind of fascist YouTuber, livestreaming the bookburnings for the greater glory of likes.

This could be darkly funny, since “burning great works of literature in a giant bonfire” seems like something Logan Paul would do on a Tuesday.

But you can’t just add social media to Fahrenheit 451 and assume the main point still stands. And the version of the internet Bahrani renders here is beyond goofy.

There are multiple sequences where we cut back to an extreme wide shot of Cleveland, and see Guy and the Captain’s faces are broadcast live onto skyscrapers. It’s one of many goofy visual ideas that makes this future feel punishingly familiar: Aiming for Blade Runner 2049 , they landed on Total Recall 2070.

From what we can see, people in the future do nothing but watch what Michael B. Jordan is doing, which sounds less dystopic than aspirational. Even the worst Black Mirror understands how people use the internet, extrapolating our contemporary relationship with digitality forward. By comparison, Fahrenheit 451 vacillates between being dangerously old-fashioned and witlessly ranty—half ode to print, half SnapChat screed.

Jordan has a couple nice moments early in the film, leading his fireman pals in squad songs, that old Friday Night Lights sensitive-jock charisma curdling into something sinister. But the story lobotomizes Montag into a passive observer, every so gradually starting to realize that there might be something wrong with bookburning. (He also has multiple flashbacks to some trauma involving his father, an odd Batman-ification of the book’s character.)

Meanwhile, Shannon looms like it’s going out of style. Every one of his lines is a speech. “After the last of your generation dies, so will your words, your memories, and the burden of your fake past!” he’ll say, or “How can we see anything but the fire’s shadow in the cave, if we’re never allowed to move our heads?” Yes, yes, how indeed, how indeed.

You recall how, in The Shape of Water , Shannon shaded his big bad with so many unexpected emotions—cowardice, weakness, desperation, straight-up stupidity, none of it making him less threatening but all of it making his monster more human. By comparison, his Fahrenheit 451 performance feels plastic, halfway to Zod. Can’t Hollywood give this man something new to do?

Halfway through Fahrenheit , bored to daydreaming, I started imagining how wonderful it would be for Michael Shannon to play an architect in a rom-com, or perhaps a lonely single dad in a children’s film about the redemptive power of rescue puppies.

Anyone who loves books will get a minor contact high from all the literary shoutouts. Walking through a large library, Guy grabs a random book. Of course it’s a Dostoevsky, Notes From Underground, because it wouldn’t be important if he just grabbed a Clive Cussler romp. At one point, a rebel reveals that she has a James Joyce book tied to her stomach like a suicide vest. Alexander pops up as a renegade whose compatriots have memorized the great works of literature: Van Gogh’s letters, Charles Darwin’s science, Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon . One person knows every word to Anna Karenina , and a much cooler person knows every line of White Teeth .

You get the picture: The film’s painfully sincere, worried all this tweeting will create a species of illiterates repeating history without ever learning it. Fair point. No doubt, this world would be better if everyone read Ulysses . (Heck, the world would be better if everyone just strapped Ulysses to their stomach: What an ab workout!) But the thudding execution of this idea dulls the point to absurdity. I started to feel bad for the internet. Some of the adaptation choices are strange beyond reason. Bahrani has gotten rid of a vast nuclear subplot—ironically, one element from Bradbury’s book that suddenly hasn’t aged a day—and added in a plot contrivance that involves injections of literary DNA and a very important bird. If that sounds silly, is it ever.

By the end, this version of Fahrenheit is reduced to an outline of an allegory. Shannon swans around in Alexander McQueen-ish leather. Jordan’s reduced to carrying a flamethrower while everyone else says big important things. The dialogue sounds tin, near-parodic. “Next time I tell you to follow someone,” Shannon screams at an underling, “You crawl into their a–hole, you hear me?” Fahrenheit 451 has it heart in the right place, but its head sure crawled up somewhere.

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Review: ‘Fahrenheit 451’ Has Fire and Fury but Sheds Little Light

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By James Poniewozik

• May 16, 2018

Early in “Fahrenheit 451,” Montag ( Michael B. Jordan ) readies himself in front of his bathroom mirror, which doubles as a supersize smart screen, pulsating with news updates and a never-ending river of responses from his social-media followers.

Am I a bad person if my first response was, “Wow, if I had one of those, I would never have to worry about dropping my iPhone in the sink again”?

Probably. Even if you are not familiar with the Ray Bradbury source novel, “Fahrenheit” makes it quickly, hammeringly clear that it is a cautionary tale. You’ll get that from the urban-noir aesthetic, the school-indoctrination sessions and the fact that Montag’s job as a “fireman” involves not fighting fires but starting them — burning humanity’s last remaining books as well as their digital reproductions, all of which have been outlawed.

Electronic media change, but the anxiety about them remains. In Mr. Bradbury’s day, it was the sudden rise of TV as America’s pastime; today it’s the ubiquitous screens that have us checking Twitter during our morning ablutions. (I know, I know, I’m trying to quit.)

But the dystopia of the new “Fahrenheit 451,” airing Saturday on HBO, is generic, its critique muddled and its tone as subtle as a flamethrower.

Mr. Bradbury’s novel, published in 1953, required some technological and conceptual updating. Some of its concerns are timeless, others specifically 1950s. It worries about postwar social conformity, anti-intellectualism, McCarthyism and the homogenizing power of the new medium of TV to flatten out differences in thought and make its audience placid.

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Fahrenheit 451 (2018)

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Movie Review: 'Fahrenheit 451'

It used to be that we didn’t expect that much from our TV movies. For a long time, there was a good reason a movie would head to television instead of the theater. 

Then outlets like HBO started developing or snapping up major projects, and we entered the era of prestige television. Now, we expect our TV movies to be just as artful as anything we see at the multiplex.

But while we have to give a lot of credit to HBO for raising our standards, they don’t always get things right. Take the new adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, released on HBO last weekend, and a throwback to those earlier days when TV movies were… not so good.

The movie sets up like Bradbury’s novel, taking place at some point in the future when books are banned, and fireman Guy Montag is tasked with sniffing out and burning any books he can find. We’ve updated things a bit for the digital age, and the movie eventually departs significantly from the book, but the basic story is pretty much what you remember. But for having such distinguished source material, the movie goes very wrong.

The dialogue is the worst part-- hackneyed, wooden, and clunky, with characters talking about important things like “transponders” and “The OMNIS” and reading lines like, “If you hide from me in your sleep, you better wake up and apologize.” And even though the movie stars probably the two hottest Michaels in Hollywood right now, Michael B. Jordan and Michael Shannon, they do little to try to save it. Jordan is as bland as I’ve ever seen him, and Shannon mostly plays a low-rent version of his usual stone-faced villain. If they don’t care, why should we?

Even more disappointing is that Fahrenheit 451 was written and directed by Ramin Bahrani, who made two of the great movies of the past 20 years, the deeply human Man Push Cart and Chop Shop . But somehow, with this movie, he’s made a deeply empty experience. Here, I’ve got an idea: go watch Bahrani’s earlier work, go read Bradbury’s novel, and burn this movie.

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Fahrenheit 451.

• Parents say (2)
• Kids say (4)

Based on 2 parent reviews

Much more mature and original adaptation

This title has:

• Great messages
• Too much violence
• Too much swearing

Report this review

The book is essential reading for children; this adaption of the novel is a good supplement for teens and mature tweens..

• Educational value

Fahrenheit 451 (2018) – A Shallow Sci-Fi Film (Early Review)

Now I don’t have to read the book!

Synopsis: In a terrifying care-free future, a young man, Guy Montag, whose job as a fireman is to burn all books, questions his actions after meeting a young girl…and begins to rebel against society.  (IMDB)

Starring: Michael B. Jordan , Michael Shannon, and  Sofia Boutella

Writers: Ramin Bahrani and Amir Naderi

Director: Ramin Bahrani

Rating:  TV-MA

Running Time:  100mins

Airs:  May 19th at 8pm on HBO Canada (Canada)/HBO (United States)

Hollywood has gone overboard with reboots over the last decade but a reboot of a 52 year old film based on the novel Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury is okay. Despite not having read the novel, those who have read it or seen the 1966 film will probably not be surprised by this new film for the most part. For those unaware, the film takes place in a dystopian society ruled by a new government called the ministry who have outlawed music, art, movies, or books in an attempt to control the masses, creating the illusion of happiness. Any remaining books, physical or digital, were burned by firemen.

The film threw us right into the story, following a young fireman named Montag (Jordan) and his team captain named Beatty (Shannon). In this society, firemen were celebrities with their own fans cheering them on as they did all their burning live on a ministry-controlled network called the 9. Sides were clearly drawn as there were those who conformed and the one who didn’t were called eels. They rebelled against the ministry by preserving the knowledge they fought hard to repress. Montag was indoctrinated from a young age and the fireman life was the only life he knew thanks to the tutelage of Beatty. The lack of a backstory for Montag affected the film later on as it took away the emotional impact of his inevitable reversal. From there, he became a passenger in his own story.

Montag began to question the only life he knew after meeting an eel and one of Beatty’s informants, a woman named Clarisse (Boutella). She challenged his beliefs and over time, he would become more and more disillusioned while striking a working relationship (and thankfully not a romantic one)  with Clarisse and her fellow eels. However, escaping Montag’s former life would prove to be difficult, especially when it came to Beatty. Beatty was somewhat menacing but he felt more like a counterpoint than an actual character.

The film world was very dark and cinematic in feel, matching the story and subject matter and the production values were impressive as a whole considering its a TV movie and was shot in Hamilton, Ontario . The few action sequences were exciting to watch but there could have been more since the film chose to focus on Montag’s internal conflict. Clarisse had a conflict of her own between Montag and Beatty, however, her conflict didn’t matter all that much since she was more of a plot device than an actual character. Despite the predictable story and the paper thin characters, the film was still somewhat compelling to watch.

The best part of the film was the performances from Jordan and Shannon as Montag and Beatty. They took their paper thin characters and managed to breathe some life into them. Jordan is already immensely likable which made it easy to buy into Montag’s internal conflict but the writing made it difficult to connect with him on a deeper level. Shannon, like he has done many times before, was a menacing and charming presence as Beatty, saving a character that could easily have been a caricature.

Overall, this was a decent sci-film that adds nothing new to the conversation by beating us over the head with an obvious message that doesn’t quite work as well today. Despite its paper thin characters, it was still somewhat compelling to watch thanks to great production values and performances from Michael B. Jordan and Michael Shannon.

Score: 6.5/10

If you liked this, please read my other reviews  here  and don’t forget to follow me on  Twitter , follow me on  Instagram , and also like me on  Facebook .

The EIC of the coincidentally-named keithlovesmovies.com. A Canadian who prefers to get out of the cold and into the warmth of a movie theatre.

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Deadpool 2 - An Aimless Sequel

Life sentence season 1 episode 9: what to expect when you're not expecting review.

Tony Briley

May 21, 2018 at 6:08 PM

Thanks for the review. I’ll be skipping this one, I never could get into the previous movie nor the book for that matter. With today’s technology, it just seems even more far fetched and a ridiculous plot. While some of these dystopian societies of the future movies can work, to me they fall flat most of the time. An example is the Brazilian 3% show on Netflix. It has interesting characters and enough excitement to get me to look past the obvious impossibility of it. Things like, who cooks that awesome food on the offshore? Who does the dishes? There is a police force where cops get shot at? Sounds just like the inland but with more beautiful scenery. But 451 never could make me look past the biggest flaws, even though I grew up in the Bible Belt where we were told daily “they” were going to take our bibles and burn them.

May 22, 2018 at 12:03 AM

I read the novel way back in High School – and it made a huge impression on me. While it may not work in the digital world that now exists, I still think it is a discussion we need to have – after all the Firemen in this movie seem to delight in destroying knowledge.

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Fahrenheit 451 Reviews

Confusing new framework only gets in the way of the story...

Full Review | Dec 8, 2022

Bahrani's heavy-handedness robs Fahrenheit 451 of its potency, which is unfortunate, as Bradbury's story proves achingly imperative today by reflecting how governments instill control.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Mar 14, 2022

It just didn't make a version that merits attention as viewers navigate a signal-and-noise reality Bradbury himself would have likely deemed fiction...

Full Review | Jul 28, 2021

I've got an idea: go watch Bahrani's earlier work, go read Bradbury's novel, and burn this movie.

Full Review | Jul 16, 2021

If the Bahrani-Naderi version of Fahrenheit 451 had focused more soberly and objectively on what "book-burning" and "memory loss" mean today in our concrete social circumstances, it might have been a meaningful contribution.

Full Review | Feb 11, 2021

In the age of disinformation, one would think a visit to Bradbury's classic would be timely, but this version doesn't offer enough of a fresh take to address anything pertinent.

Full Review | Feb 13, 2020

When fake news can affect real elections, there is no better time to consider the lessons of this modernized "Fahrenheit 451."

Full Review | Nov 25, 2019

The result is a very weak update, that also masks several of the strengths found in Bradbury's novel. Very forgettable. [Full Review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Jul 19, 2019

Though heavy-handed, HBO's version carries on in that spirit, underlining that it's usually worthwhile to question what's become normal.

Full Review | May 29, 2019

Bahrani crafts a distinctive and tense narrative, but none of his editorial choices match the depth or power of the original book.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Feb 13, 2019

Books aren't just the stories within, but also the memories and associations they create, paths to other places. That doesn't really come across in this adaptation; rather it sets up several pathways that remain unexplored.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Jan 9, 2019

While the film attempts to put its own spin on the story for the digital age, Bahrani's film does not measure up to the source material.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Oct 10, 2018

[This] adaptation of Ray Bradburry's classic novel doesn't really shock the core like it should, mostly because it's a movie that wants the essence of a narrative without really digging into the themes.

Full Review | Aug 27, 2018

HBO's Fahrenheit 451 is horrifically beautiful. It feels both divorced from and intrinsically tied to its source material, the 1953 dystopian novel by Ray Bradbury.

Full Review | Jun 28, 2018

There are things that work with the adaptation that could have been even more successful given time to play out over the course of a season.

Full Review | Jun 14, 2018

This lavish HBO-produced adaptation certainly looks the part, but does feel a touch light on for impact considering the weight of the themes it is carrying.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 1, 2018

Bahrani's fondness for drama with a social justice angle is revealed in the backstory...and does not go much farther than general finger-wagging at screen-addiction and the herd mentality found on network echo chambers.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | May 31, 2018

HBO's adaptation of Ray Bradbury's classic "Fahrenheit 451" ultimately loses the plot.

Full Review | May 30, 2018

Soggy, violent adaptation of book-burning sci-fi classic.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | May 29, 2018

Fahrenheit 451, though initially compelling, ultimately does little to expand the prominent ideas of Ray Bradbury's work.

Full Review | May 29, 2018

Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Fahrenheit 451 — The Symbolic Meaning of Fire in Fahrenheit 451

The Symbolic Meaning of Fire in Fahrenheit 451

• Categories: Fahrenheit 451

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Words: 1009 |

Published: Aug 1, 2024

Words: 1009 | Pages: 2 | 6 min read

Table of contents

Suppression and control, rebellion and resistance, transformation and renewal, bibliography.

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