A comparable book or movie would be Heinlein/Verhoeven's Starship Troopers, which also presents us with a sort of attractive but ultimately nightmarish utopia. But, of course, you have to be a fan of utopian or crypto-utopian SF in order to feel this way. I can honestly say that Brave New World is among the 15 best SF movies I have seen. Science fiction is my preferred genre, and I have a collection of nearly 500 SF movies. Instead, it is not even mentioned on his IMDb bio page. He charismatically exudes power, self-confidence and self-righteousness, and he ought to have been propelled to stardom for this role. One of the greatest boons of this movie is Ron O'Neal as Mustapha Mond. I would be the first to buy this if it became available on DVD with a crisp picture quality, and I am very sorry that, so far, it isn't.
But the movie still stands as a towering achievement in television film-making.
The only thing that disappointed me was that the climactic discussion about Shakespeare in the book was almost entirely omitted in the movie. Few books about social developments can be said to be as thought-provoking as this, and the movie lives brilliantly up to the book. The treatment of the main prevailing ideologies of Huxley's time - Marxism and rampant capitalist consumerism - is both progressive and satirical and far ahead of its time, the two -isms being mind-bogglingly blended into a harmonic mix containing all the worst elements of both. It paints a bleak yet strangely compelling picture of a completely unfree society in which everybody has been engineered and indoctrinated to be happy. It is something so rare as a great science fiction adaptation of a great science fiction novel, debating all the salient points of dystopia and utopia that science fiction is the perfect genre for exploring. Before rewatching it, I read the book, and the movie completely amazed me. I have just been watching Brave New World on Google Videos (where it can be seen for free), for the first time since I saw it on television in the early '80s (being only about eleven at the time, I could only remember a very few scenes). If you are interested in seeing it, the film (and the worse Nimoy version) are available to watch on YouTube.
#Brave new world book review tv
And, the story itself is so good even a lower-budgeted TV version like this one is worth your time. It does look a tad dated but overall it's still much better than the ultra-bland later Leonard Nimoy version of the story. As for the rest of the story, it generally was well done at showing the vacuousness of the future engineered society-and the use of drugs, genetics and sex to keep everyone dumb and happy. Much of it could be because it was so obvious since the film was a bit overlong. I found it wearisome after a while hearing him talking in Shakespearean lingo.something not as ever-present in the book. Well, I sure was surprised, as I really didn't love the film nearly as much as I once did-much of it due to the really annoying way that John the Savage talked. I loved the book and its prescient look at the future of mankind and now, decades later, I decided to watch this television adaptation once again. When I saw this television film back in 1980, I was captivated-so captivated that I almost immediately went out and read the source material, the Aldous Huxley novel.
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