Fahrenheit 451

Saw the trailer for HBO's Fahrenheit 451 adaptation.

It looked OK, I guess, but it brought to mind a complaint I also had about the notoriously awful Atlas Shrugged film trilogy (which had lots of other problems).

For lack of a better term (maybe it has one I don't know about), I'm sick of this generic sci-fi near-future setting (or in the case of Atlas Shrugged, effectively the present day). If you're taking source material written in a particular 1950s vision of the future, go with the retro-futurism. Keep to the universe of the novel, not awkwardly transposing it into the typical 2018 vision of what 2030 or 2070 will look like. Which basically boils down to: everybody has iPhones, but they'll be transparent! The color palette will be strictly grey, blue, and orange!

There is a lot of commentary that's relevant to the present day in F451, but it works so much better in the vision of the then near-ish future as Ray Bradbury described it in 1953. Technology hasn't developed in exactly the way he predicted, but those differences are part of the setting and important to some of the themes. There are lessons to be drawn not just from the similarity, but also the contrasts between that world and reality, and that gets blasted away if you insist on setting it in our reality or our near-future.

The same is true of many other works of the similar era and genre: 1984, Atlas Shrugged, Brave New World, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, etc. Not everything has to be set in 2018 plus a decade or two. Instead of honoring the important classics, it turns them into blandly indistinguishable generic Hollywood mush.

/ end grumpy old man rant