Fahrenheit 451 (2018) * *

Directed by:  Ramin Bahrani

Starring:  Michael B. Jordan, Michael Shannon, Sofia Boutella, Keir Dullea

Fahrenheit 451 is the latest movie adaptation of Ray Bradbury's 1953 novel, written during the age of McCarthyism and resonated for those reasons.    Now, in the age of the Internet and Kindles, the idea of burning books in a futuristic world just seems...silly.  It is amusing to hear Michael Shannon's Beatty discuss how the powers-that-be did away with "the original Internet", but still most cities employ entire fire departments and trucks to dispatch "firemen" to burn heaps of books live on TV.    They promise there won't be any such thing as books in the near future.    Who do people call in the event of actual fires caused by something other than burning books?

The firemen in Fahrenheit 451 are celebrities treated almost reverentially by the public.    Their job is to weed out "eels" (those who still possess black market copies of actual books) and set fire to their libraries or heap of books with flamethrowers.    The firemen appear to be the police force as well, since I didn't recall seeing any police vehicles at any of the book burning sites.    The rising star in the Cleveland, Ohio Fire Department is Guy Montag (Jordan), who is all in on burning books.    He loves it so much that I was reminded of Beavis shouting "FIRE, FIRE".    But, then on a dime, he becomes Conflicted and his eyes and body language betray his newfound guilt.     

This is the second futuristic movie this year to take place in a future Ohio.   Ready Player One took place in Columbus, while this movie is in Cleveland.    Is Ohio ground zero for intolerance and fear in the near future?    At one point, Montag's view on book burning changes when, during a book bust, a library owner sets herself on fire along with her books.    She shouts "Omnis" before lighting the match, and Montag is now curious as to what Omnis means.  Yes, I said book bust, and it sounds just as ridiculous as it does to see it onscreen.  

We meet an underground double agent named Clarisse (Boutella), who acts as an informant for the firemen and also works for the rebellion.   She and Montag become an item, I think.  She knows what Omnis is.    It is supposedly a microscopic piece of DNA injected into a bird in order for it to avoid detection by the government.   Clarisse says the most profound thing in the movie, ("The ministry didn't just form.   People wanted it,").    That is true of Trumpism, McCarthyism, Fascism, and Nazism.   It would have been interesting to see how this society came to be the way it is, but instead we get scene after scene of book burning.    Maybe the Kindles were already destroyed, for all I know.

Michael Shannon has the cold, villainous bureaucrat thing down pat, and there is nothing about his character that isn't predictable or foreshadowed, right down his squelching of his own inner conflict.    It is done well, but we saw it already as recently as The Shape of Water.   The trouble with Jordan's performance is he is pretty much a good guy right from the beginning, even when he was playing a pyro happy fireman.    What causes his changes of heart?   The movie doesn't expound on that in much detail.   We see flashbacks of his past in which his father was busted for reading a book, but all of this is never convincing.   He played a better villain in Black Panther.   He may as well wear a t-shirt that says, "I AM ABOUT TO CHANGE MY VIEWS AND JOIN THE REBELLION"

Intolerance of other ideas and cultures has relevance to today's climate, but Fahrenheit 451 isn't the movie to address that climate.    Its ideas are more intriguing than its plot and characters.    This is the first futuristic movie I can recall in which I was somewhat hoping The Matrix guys would drop in to liven things up.