Books at the Box Office: Fahrenheit 451

Every single time a “classic” is adapted to film everyone puts on their cardigans and has a debate over whether now is the time and if the actors are right, and that happened for like A SECOND with Fahrenheit 451 (with hot man Michael B Jordan no less) and then it kind of..disappeared. But I’m also not on all the Bradbury listservs,so maybe I just missed it.

Let’s take a look.

First, the book:

Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television “family.” But when he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didn’t live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known.

Come on, you don’t need my thoughts here. You either loved it, didn’t read it, or were like “okay,cool, back to 1984.”

Now, the film, which debuted in 2018 on HBO.

Michael B Jordan, Michael Shannon, that sweet HBO money, what could go wrong? Well, I dunno, but something did.The IMDB rating is only 4.9 out of 10. The Rotten Tomatoes score is 33%. Perhaps they went a little TOO hard with that sweet HBO money and made it too futuristic. There isn’t something charmingly rustic about some of the mid-century dystopian novels, ya know?