The supposedly wild and free Cooper is played badly by Guinee I just didn't care for him or his situation and never really got the feel of a man who is gradually realising that he is in hell. The cast are pretty low rent to a man - when Nimoy is a surprise big cameo, you know you're in the sh*t! Gallagher is pretty bland and didn't really do anything for me in the lead and support from Kihlstedt is not great either. As it is, it doesn't manage to really engage and I found myself not really caring. But it just doesn't deliver all these in a good package which it really needed to do in order to get by. It is of vague interest on this level and there were certain parallels that made me think - problem was, I didn't leave the film thinking - I ignore the action onscreen and just starting pondering! Films should make you think - but surely not to the point where your thoughts are actually better than what's on the screen! So yes it says lots of stuff about social classes (which we have - workers and middlemen and top men), consumerism, slogans, media saturation and loss of individualism. This is very obvious and is far too simple a point to make in an attempt to translate Huxley. The plot is roughly the same but the film is keen to point out how this future is so very like the current world that many of us in the West now live in.

This version is kind of interesting in an obvious way, but really is not even worthy of sharing the name of the book (and indeed doesn't really stick to it either).

For a major film to attempt to bring a major novel to the screen is a brave move, but for a cheap TVM to have a stab at it is even more of a risk. Initially John is taken by the society but gradually he begins to see that the world is not as he wants it. When a chance helicopter accident brings him into contact with one of the `savages', John Cooper, he brings him back as an experiment. However one of the conditioning team, Bernard, can't help but feel if there were any ways of making it better. In society, babies are no longer born, they are designed into social categories to decide their future roles. In the near future society is managed so that everyone is happy - only a few live on the edges of society as trash.

Eread brave new world online