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 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 it also creates a disconnect between the world it depicts 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.