Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
It feels like it should be in the future and that it's in the past as the same time.
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It seems to me that goes with the territory with classic futuristic science fiction. I don't know how it can be avoided.
I watched the film after I finished reading the book; I remembered it as weird, flawed, but compelling for all that. My updated reaction is that it's just a bad movie. Oskar Werner and Julie Christie are terrible and the plot tweaks make less sense than the book (although apparently Bradbury liked the Book People at the end, rather than the holocaust). Oh, and speaking of the holocaust, just how far did Montag manage to float/walk from the city that he escaped the effects of fallout?
Anyway. One of the problems with the film is that it suggests that all books are worthy, which is patently foolish. Books can be every bit as junky as television with the "family." Books can serve different purposes, from mindless entertainment to mindblowing insight, but they're not all equally worthy. One has to assume that print media are targeted in part because it's a means of oppression in itself. It has to be worth it to a regime to give up the advantages of disseminating its own message in the easiest and cheapest method, rather than just engaging in heavy censorship. The twentieth century book burners didn't burn everything.
It interested me, though, that this wasn't very far in the future, certainly not from where we are now and even from when Bradbury wrote it in the early 1950s. Not that long after 2020, I assume from the text. The second Trump administration! But harking back to Jon's comment about being set simultaneously in the future and the past, I suppose for this kind of scifi, the closer in the future, the less time has to be spent on re-imagining technology. The odd reference will do - like those robot bank tellers! Less than 25 years before ATMs. Who needs robots?