Brave New World

'Brave New World', the 1932 novel by Aldous Huxley, told of a new world where babies were decanted as Alphas, Betas, Deltas, Epsilons, or Gammas, all designed to know their places in society, and in the case of the lower classes, decanted as multiple identical twins to staff entire factories and production lines. Their God is Ford (as in Henry) and their motto is 'history is bunk'.

In the book, Bernard Marx is a fish out of water, an Alpha of stunted growth who has dangerous ideas, who refuses to act like he is expected to, and is generally despised. The film's Bernard is Peter Gallagher, a kind of magnetic Romeo figure, popular with the girls, and a confident success. Already there's been some tampering done with the source.

With Rya Kihlstedt as a colourless Lenina (again nothing like the book's character, who is conventional to a 't') and Leonard Nimoy as the Controller, Mustapha Mond, the film loses impact and goes downhill very quickly.

Nods can be given (grudingly) at the attempts to develop computer generated conditioning forms, and to give some sense of a futuristic world. It just doesn't come off. The savage reservation is simply full of young Americans out to pick a fight, while John (the savage child of Linda, a Beta stranded in the reservation) does speak Shakespeare, but is otherwise of little interest and very unlike the book.

A disappointment and a huge bore, missing both the humour and the science-fiction/faction innovations of Huxley's novel.

Brave new world is one of the most inspiring and prescient novels of the 20th century (it was first published in 1932). In the future it portrays, humanity has achieved its final goal: happiness, understood as the ability of each person to satisfy his/her impulses almost immediately. Achieving this goal means leaving science, religion, and most of our culture in the way. In this perfect world people have all the sex and TV they want, hyperconsumption is a social virtue, and books are denigrated because they promote individualism. Sounds familiar?

The novel is dark and pessimistic and the characters' personality is flat because they are supposed to be that way. The only exception in the novel, the savage, is well portrayed in the movie but the rest of the characters appear too normal (too present-day) in the movie. This is especially true in the case of Lenina, the central female character who is supposed to be typical of her time (no brains, just fun, thank you) in the novel while in the movie has a more complex personality. This change ends up altering the plot and was probably caused by that big stupidity of our times, political correctness.

This adaptation of the novel for TV mass consumption also includes several other changes such as an assassination plot (unthinkable in the original) and the inclusion of a happy ending, which completely distort the message. Maybe, the novel was right: all that matters is having a lot of sex and violence on TV but we should avoid "intellectual" narratives that make people think and, therefore, "unhappy".

1/10.

The book by Aldous Huxley is a classic, not just for its intrigueing plot and characters, but its prediction of the future which seems eerily like our own. And this made for TV movie shows just how our minds have changed, as it completely ignores the moral issues in the novel and falls prey to itself.

For example, the frequent makeup commercials airing between breaks. Beauty is everything. Nobody looks old or gets ugly.

The previews on TV. Sex sells. Sex is good. Sex is harmless. Everybody does it.

The savages being portrayed as white rather than how they are in the book. Don't offend anyone. Avoid racism.

The flashiness. Leonard Nimoy. Ooh-ahh. Everything is happy.

All the themes and slogans that cloud the minds of the common citizen to the point where it becomes human nature to them, seem to have clouded the minds of the people who made this movie. They fall to their own society's entrappings, not seeing themselves for who they are, but falling to spur of the moment emotions, be it passion or extravagance or just trying to make an extra dollar on a TV movie (games must have an economical purpose, afterall). Anyway, read the book. You'll see how you live in a whole new light.

When I first read "Brave New World" five or six years ago now, I remember thinking about how Huxley was a genius. Whilst not a big fan of his first book "Chrome Yellow", he still always put a point across. In this film though, they lost a lot of the ideas. I always used to wonder what a film adaptation would be like and not long after finishing the book for the third time I realised that deep down there could never be a decent adaptation. Simply put, despite being over 75 years old, the book still talks of ideas which modern society is scared to accept. For one thing, could you really imagine a major Blockbuster movie in which children played erotic games at the start? In a world where a mild swear word is condemned, that sort of imagery would be instantly condemned & banned. With this in mind, a decent adaptation could never be done. Therefore, it's admirable that they make any sort of effort to recreate Huxley's book. However for a book which would influence me in such a powerful way, it's disappointing they didn't realise that it's better to not touch something rather than create a half decent version. Ah well. That's Hollywood for you.

This Hollywood makeover stylistically embodies many of the points made in the text; the victory of shallowness over sincerity, style over substance, sloganism over communication -- the movie is less than the book in so many of the ways that mankind is made less in the Brave New World. Coincidence? But who DOES read Shakespeare? Or for that matter, Huxley? If the movie were made true to it's original form, the intelligentsia would cheer and marvel just as they admired the original masterpiece, but what of those who need these insights the most? This movie reaches out to the brainwashed: the production / consumption units among us born and bred in the artifice of western civilization. Who needs these concepts more? Those who have already ascertained the game, muttering amongst themselves in coffee houses? Or those to whom the idea that this so-called reality is somehow "less" than the uncivilized world is a new idea and difficult to swallow . . . even in small bites? The American public is deeply asleep in a shared symbolic consciousness that obliterates the real. This movie eases the uninitiated into awareness through a television medium with which they are familiar and can relate. The characters, their motivations and dynamics have an air of familiarity in the TV world. It has the familiar hooks and subplots that would be expected in a quest for ratings, but is that all bad when it floats out at least some of the book's main ideas in a palatable form, diluting yet expanding Huxley's reach? The movie DOES make many valid and thoughtful statements that just don't get a lot of airplay in this society and deserves credit for making some bold statements - especially right before commercials.

I think the purists are being too harsh. This version of Brave New World reaches the most important audience - the uninitiated - in a way that's entertaining and understandable. It's a good start, and I recommend it as such.