The past Saturday I finally got around to watching HBO’s adaptation of the Ray Bradbury novel Fahrenheit 451. written in 1953 the novel is a dystopian tale about a future where books are banned and firemen respond not to structure fires but to discoveries of illegal libraries and destroy them with flame.

This adaptation seems to take inspiration from the original novel and the 1966 film adaptation while inserting new elements from the filmmakers. The final product comes off as clumsy and inconsistent. The novel’s growing threat of war and commentary that an illiterate citizenry has been dropped in favor of the much more generalized idea of a population made docile with social media and entertainment. While the social medical aspects are a clever way of updating the themes of the novel removing the external threat of war steals away the purpose of the critique.

Montag’s family life and comfortable lifestyle have been removed stealing away the concept that rebellion and free thought are not without their costs. A loner loses nothing going out on his own and I believe Bradbury was very well aware of this.

The surveillance state of this adaptation is a bungled plot device as are the use of drugs to pacify the population undercutting the social media commentary that in the original work had been fulfilled by comic books and pornographic magazines.

Perhaps the greatest failure of HBO’s film is the insertion of a McGuffin devices to try and create an action adventure third act. A single strand of DNA containing all of the world’s surviving literature becomes a motivating prop that thematically is loose and disconnected from the rest of the work and only serves to provide a ‘heroic’ victory.

All in all, this adaptation is not worth the less than two hours it takes to watch it.