{"id":5474,"date":"2018-05-21T09:18:14","date_gmt":"2018-05-21T16:18:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/?p=5474"},"modified":"2018-05-21T09:18:14","modified_gmt":"2018-05-21T16:18:14","slug":"review-fahrenheit-451","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/?p=5474","title":{"rendered":"Review: FAHRENHEIT 451"},"content":{"rendered":"

What book would you memorize? If all literature was being burned forever, which tome would you commit to memory?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"\"\"HBO\u2019s recent adaptation of Ray Bradbury\u2019s classic novel \u201cFahrenheit 451\u201d is an awful miss. This ill-conceived adaptation from director Ramin Bahrani and screenwriter Amir Naderi borrows hints from the source material, but ultimately forgets the inherent tension that so permeated it. Spoiler here, one of the devices Bradbury used was the overarching threat of nuclear war to help keep things on a constant knife\u2019s edge. There\u2019s none of that in Bahrani\u2019s film.<\/p>\n

In \u201cFahrenheit 451 (2018)\u201d fireman Guy Montag is played by Michael B. Jordan, who we just saw as Erik Killmonger in \u201cBlack Panther.\u201d That film gets better with every viewing, and Jordan\u2019s tortured performance is part of its magic. He\u2019s an actor possessing natural intensity and here he is committed to Montag, but surprisingly, Bahrani\u2019s version casts the character as a depressed loner.<\/p>\n

And in doing so, Bahrani\u2019s script takes Jordon\u2019s charisma and does absolutely nothing with it, except make it uninteresting. Montag here is a real sourpuss. Frankly, taking advantage of the way Jordan walks, the way he carries himself, the way he emotes, would have darned near carried this film. It\u2019s just no fun to see Jordan in this role, and my mind wandered. Where\u2019s the flash, where\u2019s the crazed fire that made him so riveting in \u201cCreed?\u201d It\u2019s not Jordan\u2019s fault.<\/p>\n

\"\"Students of the novel will remember that Montag was married in the book, which provided some of the early conflict as his wife Mildred fought with an addiction to sleeping pills and her \u201cparlor\u201d family that was projected on the walls of their home. A key scene involves how easily she dismisses him. At one point, she can\u2019t even remember when they met. The movie tries to do this too, making its Montag confused about his father\u2019s past (which, I seem to remember in the novel may have involved his mother).<\/p>\n

Bradbury rightly predicted that people would abandon traditional reading in favor of television and other forms of passive entertainment. Do you have an Audible account?<\/p>\n

The antagonist in the \u201cFahrenheit\u201d story is Captain Beatty, Montag\u2019s fire chief. It\u2019s set in a future in which all serious literature has been outlawed. Fireman now start fires, burning illegal materials, rather than putting them out. Beatty is played in the 2018 movie by creepy cinematic stalwart Michael Shannon. Bahrani and Shannon worked together on the very good \u201c99 Homes,\u201d and the casting here is inspired. Bradbury, who would have likely loved Shannon in the role, wrote Beatty as a former reader, and in Bahrini\u2019s version, Beatty has much knowledge of literature, quoting lines randomly to a puzzled Montag.<\/p>\n

\"\"But where the award-winning novel is broken into three sections, each artfully building on the character development that came before it, this new film is very much like an abridged version. And the Bahrani\/Naderi script strips away elements that made the entire bit of fiction hang together with satiric apprehension. Therefore, there are no nuclear bombers ominously flying over the city, no robot fire station hound sniffing around, and even the walled televisions that provide Mildred her \u201cfamily\u201d have been reduced in significance.<\/p>\n

I get that Bahrani tries to make his version of \u201cFahrenheit\u201d less an action rip-off and more introspective. He abbreviates the familiar chase sequence, which is in the novel, and alters critical scenes replacing them with exposition delivered by Shannon in his cynical lip-curling drawl. It should work, but instead it\u2019s frustrating, especially, when in passing dialogue a plot point is revealed about the plan of the exiles, which I cannot reveal because, honestly, I don\u2019t really understand it. Having not read the book in 20 years, maybe this can be credited to Bradbury, however, I can\u2019t remember this part of the novel. It\u2019s all a head-scratcher, but not one worth pursuing.<\/p>\n

Sadly, an action version of the Bradbury material would have been superior to what HBO has done with it. Something akin to Spielberg\u2019s \u201cMinority Report\u201d that preserved the \u201cah, ha\u201d moments would have given viewers unfamiliar with the source a reason to visit it. But instead, some of those unfortunate souls that chose to watch this dull, humorless, and unexciting adaptation will come away blaming the failure on Bradbury.<\/p>\n

After all, the book was written back in the early 1950s and the writer passed away in 2012, right? How could a book that dated be hip enough for our modern age? It\u2019s all a sad legacy to an iconic literary presence, who Hollywood has a hard time translating. Getting it right means understanding why the original worked, and that means preserving more than a few of the source\u2019s ideas, it means actually adapting what is there on the written page. \u201cFahrenheit 451\u201d burns so much of the novel that barely more than character names and the title remain in the ashes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bradbury is poorly adapted again–this time by HBO. Jonathan gives us his thoughts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5476,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[422,418,423,419,50,421,420,104],"class_list":["post-5474","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews","tag-amir-naderi","tag-fahrenheit-451","tag-michael-b-jordan","tag-michael-shannon","tag-movie-review","tag-ramin-bahrani","tag-ray-bradbury","tag-science-fiction","has-thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5474","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5474"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5474\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5480,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5474\/revisions\/5480"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5476"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5474"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5474"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5474"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}