Brave New World

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.