BEFORE: I'm less than a week away from kicking off the Summer Rock Concert series, perhaps the longest chain I've ever put together on one topic. But this will help clear away a lot of the films on my Netflix list, even if it doesn't directly reduce the numbers on my watchlist. I've only got about 13 of the films on physical media, less than a third, but hey, I'm trying to move toward more streaming and on-demand use anyway, so this helps push me in that direction. I shouldn't have to wait for a film to hit premium cable in order to view it, not when I have so many other options available to me, including Academy screeners (when they choose to work, that is).
Sofia Boutella carries over from "Atomic Blonde", and the question is, can I link from here to the Beatles in under a week? You know that I can...
THE PLOT: In a terrifying future, Guy Montag, whose job as a fireman is to burn all books, questions his actions after meeting a young woman and begins to rebel against society.
AFTER: Of course, I've seen the 1966 film version of this story, which was directed by Francois Truffaut - his only English-language film, apparently. And anything made in 1966 would probably seem dated - though that film from over 50 years ago seems to have predicted the popularity of reality TV and its impact on viewers choosing to live vicariously through its cast members. Bradbury might have been ahead of his time, but there's no question that as a movie, this story may have been in need of an update. These dystopian future films usually portray a time that logically results from current events, but seem sort of JUST out of our current reach. Anyway, at the time the book was written, people thought that TV was a huge threat to books and education, so that's the germ of an idea that was then extrapolated out to the extreme - naturally a writer would be in favor of preserving the written word from such external mind-killing menaces.
That being said, I'm not sure this film, which made substantial changes to the original story, went about things the right way. For starters, there are a lot of references to a sort of internet, which of course was not around when either the novel or the 1966 movie was made. Here the web is called "The Nine" and contains only three books - the Bible, "Moby Dick" and "To the Lighthouse", only they're all in some kind of emoji form. Makes sense, people in the future would naturally get lazier and lazier, and the need for pictographs over words would mean that people wouldn't have to work as hard. And beyond those three books, what more would people need?
Ah, but there's the "Dark Nine", part of the internet that's used for uploading and downloading all the classic books, so people can read them before the firemen burn them. Yes, this is still a future where firemen don't put out fires, but instead they start them, to burn all the books. OK, so what do they call the people who put out the fires after the firemen start them? Fire-stoppers? Anti-firemen? This is all a little unclear.
The second problem, after changing the story to reflect internet technology, comes in reminding the younger viewers what a "book" is. Yeah, good luck with that. But I guess you have to do that before pointing out why burning them is bad, and what that represents. Even then, one of today's teens would probably think, "What's the big deal if somebody burns that book, I could just download another copy to my e-reader or find it posted on the web somewhere - or better yet, I could just watch the movie version and save myself some time." Ah, so now the firemen have to burn not only books, but also VHS tapes, DVDs and computer servers too. OK, the story's getting a little weaker by this point, but it's still workable.
They kept the part where a bunch of renegade people decide to preserve books by each memorizing one, and then they identify themselves by the book they've chosen. One person becomes the living embodiment of "The Grapes of Wrath", another learns to recite "David Copperfield" from cover to cover, and eventually former fireman Guy Montag chooses to commit Edgar Allan Poe's "Tales of Mystery and Imagination" to memory to preserve it, and I've got to think that if I had to memorize a book, that's probably the one I'd choose. But just how reliable is each person's memory? Couldn't the story change slightly with every telling, if the person memorizing it wasn't 100% accurate? This always bothered me just a tiny bit.
This remake also throws in a few jabs at overly P.C. culture, as fire Captain Beatty explains that certain books were removed from the libraries because they were sexist books written by men, or racist books written by white people - "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" is often found on lists of banned books because it uses the "N" word, but anyone familiar with the context in the story would realize that Jim the slave character is portrayed as a regular human, not as property, that the book is really anti-racist in its overall message, so banning it is really like throwing the baby out with the bath-water. With that in mind, I can kind of see where they were going with this idea, but it just doesn't work - we've seen over the years that the banning and burning of books usually comes from conservative sources, liberals are more likely to be free-thinkers and protectors of free speech, therefore much less likely to ban books. Unless Captain Beatty is lying here, and trying to cover up the real reason that books were banned, which is possible, however the use of the P.C. dodge is therefore quite misguided.
The final plot point concerns something called OMNIS, which is some kind of storage system that takes advantage of the limitless capacity of DNA, umm, or something, but this is never fully explained either, so the science seems clunky at best. And where the DNA is stored, and where it ends up just seems like an unanswered question or a dangling plot point, so I'm not sure why someone took the story in this direction in the first place.
At one point we see that there is a burning book authored by Ray Bradbury, which means that in the fictional universe the Bradbury created, there is also an author named Ray Bradbury, but then it becomes unclear if that fictional version ever wrote a book called "Fahrenheit 451", or if that would be too meta. I met the real Bradbury one time, at the Sundance Film Festival of all places, back in 1998. Someone had filmed a version of his short story "The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit", and cast a number of Latino actors in it, like Esai Morales, Edward James Olmos and Liz Torres (along with Joe Mantegna and Sid Caesar) and Bradbury attended the premiere screening. I somehow found the nerve to talk to him and get his autograph, and this was VERY early in my autograph-seeking career.
Speaking of multi-cultural casting, changing Guy Montag to an African-American character seems like an interesting move at first, but then they don't really do anything with it. Based on the argument I made last night about a lesbian spy, it's still an important move to make, but I just think it should mean something when it's done. But the opposite holds true for the flashbacks that Montag has here about his father - they go nowhere, and prove nothing, so why include them?
See this for Michael Shannon's performance, he smolders (as usual) while the books burn, but there's not much else going on here, except for visual nods to "Blade Runner", and if you want those, why not just watch "Blade Runner"? Now, if the film had chosen to make a more coherent argument by depicting a society where everyone's always staring at their phones and playing "Candy Crush" instead of reading books, it might have come closer to making a more relevant point.
Also starring Michael B. Jordan (last seen in "Black Panther"), Michael Shannon (last seen in "Nocturnal Animals"), Lilly Singh (last heard in "Ice Age: Collision Course"), Martin Donovan (last seen in "Ant-Man"), Andy McQueen, Khandi Alexander (last seen in "Patriots Day"), Dylan Taylor, Saad Siddiqui, Grace Lynn Kung, Keir Dullea (last seen in "The Good Shepherd"), Raoul Bhaneja, Lynne Griffin, Joe Pingue (last seen in "Owning Mahowny"), Ted Dykstra, Jane Moffat (last seen in "Superstar"), Sean Jones, Ted Whittall (last seen in "Suicide Squad"), Aaron Davis, Warren Belle and the voice of Cindy Katz.
RATING: 4 out of 10 protesting eels
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