Ironic how just three years ago, when this post was written, a system of universal governmental electronic surveillance was a fictional premise a viewer would have to “accept” as part of suspension of disbelief.
Given the disclosures of the real system, I’d say a reworking of the 451 premise is certainly due.
Spoilers for the book and the previous movie version…
I, too, would like to see a new adaptation (I’m not sure I’d call it a remake) of F451.
I haven’t seen the Truffaut version in entirety, only bits and pieces. Not entirely impressed, except by the ending. (Even Bradbury admitted that bringing Clarisse back was a good thing, and added it to his stage play version. Heck, when we read the book in seventh grade I thought that it was quite possible she was still alive myself! We only hear of her death second-hand, from not very reliable sources, and since the government faked Montag’s death to cover up the fact that he’d escaped it’s not implausible that they could have spread it around about Clarisse’s, too.)
Agreed that they’d have to find some way around electronic books and such. And they’d probably have to leave out the war, as they did in the Truffaut movie (another good call). Bradbury wrote his first draft, The Fireman, in 1950 and the F451 we know came out in 1953–only five to eight years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It seemed as if Bradbury didn’t really know at that time how widespread the after-effects of nuclear weapons could be…he seemed to present it as a HOPEFUL ending now that the old society was purged. That the cities would be destroyed but life outside them would go on just fine. He even had the survivors walking back toward the city to help refugees and start rebuilding without ever thinking that they should, oh, STAY THE HELL AWAY FROM THE FALLOUT! (It made a little more sense in those early drafts, when the war was described as being “semi-atomic”.)
By the time Truffaut made his version in the sixties, we knew more about how damaging and how lasting the aftermath of nuclear weapons could be, so it made more sense to leave that angle out. It would be even more true in whatever new adaptation they might make. We eighties Cold War kids just wouldn’t be able to accept a hopeful ending seconds after nuclear weapons have blown cities to bits.
They might prove as bad as the disgusting new left-wingers we currently have in power
I wasn’t going to say it … !