Fahrenheit 451

An extraordinarily lazy adaptation

With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word 'intellectual,' of course, became the swear word it deserved to be. You always dread the unfamiliar. Surely you remember the boy in your own school class who was exceptionally 'bright,' did most of the reciting and answering while the others sat like so many leaden idols, hating him. And wasn't it this bright boy you selected and tortured after hours? Of course it was_. We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves again. So! A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man's mind. Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man?_

• Ray Bradbury; Fahrenheit 451 (1954)

I don't do remakes. They're a cancer of the industry. Where I am more flexible, however, is in adaptations of novels that have already been adapted. After all, my all-time favourite film falls into this category (Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line (1998) was the second adaptation of James Jones's novel). Fahrenheit 451 is also a second adaptation; in this case, of Ray Bradbury's 1953 novel, and, for all intents and purposes, it's a misfire. Bradbury himself has said the novel is not about censorship, as is often assumed, but was written in response to the Second Red Scare and the rise of McCarthyism. More specifically, it's a treatise on the dangers of an illiterate society unquestionably accepting the word of a monopolising centralised mass media.

Adapted for the screen and directed by Ramin Bahrani (99 Homes), the film is set at an unspecified point in the future, after a second civil war has been fought. All aspects of s...

Timely for sure, and check that cast, but 2018's Fahrenheit 451 is a TV movie and it plays like one.

Final rating:★★ - Had some things that appeal to me, but a poor finished product.

So...what would happen if Fahrenheit 451 was made into a movie by the Cancel Culture crowd? You don't have to wonder, it's right here.

It's a movie about book burning... and CRT... so, you know, they want to say that when the right burns books it's bad, and whiteness, and evil... but some books still need to be burned, because if you don't burn them than people might get wrong think, and that is bad too.

And because of that, it never really finds its footing.

But it does succeed in taking a movie about censorship, inserting 1619 Project Revisionist History pro-censorship politics, and then making it completely and totally unwatchable.

And that might have been the intent. But I get the feeling that Jordan just threw up his arms in frustration, gave up, and decided to phone it in and get it done as fast as he could.