A. Huxley - Brave New World

G. Orwell - 1984

George Orwell made no secret of the fact that his great novel 1984 was not really about the future but about the very time he wrote it in, the bleak years after World War II when England shivered in poverty and hunger. In a novel where passion is depicted as a crime, the greatest passion is expressed, not for sex, but for contraband strawberry jam, coffee and chocolate.

What Orwell feared, when he wrote his novel in 1948, was that Hitlerism, Stalinism, centralism and conformity would catch hold and turn the world into a totalitarian prison camp. It is hard, looking around (he globe, to say that he was altogether wrong.Michael Radford’s brilliant film of Orwell’s vision does a good job of finding that line between the “future” world of 1984 and the grim postwar world in which Orwell wrote.

The movie’s 1984 is like a year arrived at through a time warp, an alternative reality that looks constructed out of old radio tubes and smashed office furniture. There is not a single prop in this movie that you couldn’t buy in a junkyard, and yet the visual result is uncanny: Orwell’s hero, Winston Smith, lives in a world of grim and crushing inhumanity, of bombed factories, bug-infested bedrooms and citizens desperate for the most simple pleasures.

The film opens with Smith rewriting history: His task is to change obsolete government documents so that they reflect current reality. He methodically scratches out old headlines, obliterates the photographs of newly made “unpersons,” and attends mass rallies at which the worship of Big Brother alternates with numbing reports of the endless world war that is still going on somewhere, involving somebody.Into Smith’s world comes a girl, Julia, who slips him a note of stunning force. The note says, “I love you.” Smith and Julia become revolutionaries by making love, walking in the countryside and eating strawberry jam.

Then Smith is summoned to the office of O’Brien, a high official of the “inner party,” who seems to be a revolutionary too, and who gives him the banned writings, of an enemy of the state.This story is, of course, well known. 1984 must be one of the most widely read novels of our time.

What is remarkable about the movie is how completely it satisfied my feelings about the book; the movie looks, feels, and almost tastes and smells like Orwell’s bleak and angry vision.John Hurt with his scrawny body and lined and weary face, makes the perfect Winston Smith; and Richard Burton, looking so old and weary in this film that it is little wonder he died soon after finishing it, is the immensely cynical O’Brien, who feels close to people only while he is torturing them.

Suzanna Hamilton is Julia, a fierce little war orphan whose rebellion is basically inspired by her hungers.Radford’s style in the movie is an interesting experiment.

Like Chaplin in “Modern Times,” he uses passages of dialogue that are not meant to be understood - nonsense words and phrases, garbled as they are transmitted over Big Brother’s primitive TV, and yet listened to no more or less urgently than the messages that say something.

The 1954-film version of Orwell’s novel turned it into a cautionary, simplistic science fiction tale. This version penetrates much more deeply into the novel’s heart of darkness.

ROGER EBERT

Brazil

Just as George Orwell’s 1984 is an alternate vision of the past, present and future, so “Brazil” is a variation of Orwell’s novel.

The movie happens in a time and place that seem vaguely like our own, but with different graphics, hardware and politics.

Society is controlled by a monolithic organization, and citizens lead a life of paranoia and control. Thought police are likely to come crashing through the ceiling and start bashing dissenters.

Life is mean and grim.The hero of “Brazil” is Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce), a meek, desperate little man who works at a computer terminal all day.

Occasionally he cheats; when the boss isn’t looking, he and his fellow workers switch the screens of their computers to reruns of exciting old TV programs.

Sam knows his life is drab and lockstep, but he sees no way out of it. His only escape is into his fantasies - into glorious dreams of flying high above all the petty cares of the world, urged on by the vision of a beautiful woman.His everyday life offers no such possibilities.

Even the basic mechanisms of life support seem to be failing, and one scene early in the movie has Robert De Niro in a walk-on as an illegal free-lance repairman who defies the state by fixing things. De Niro makes his escape by sliding down long cables to freedom, like Spider-Man.

For Sam, there seems to be no escape.But then he gets involved in an intrigue that involves the girl of his dreams, the chief executive of the state and a shadowy band of dissenters. All of this is strangely familiar; the outlines of “Brazil” are much the same as those of 1984, but the approach is different.

While Orwell’s lean prose was translated last year into an equally lean and dour film, “Brazil” seems almost like a throwback to the psychedelic 1960s, to an anarchic vision in which the best way to improve things is to blow them up.The other difference between the two worlds - Orwell’s and the one created here by director and co-writer Terry Gilliam - is that Gilliam apparently has had no financial restraints.

Although “Brazil” has had a checkered history since it was made (for a long time, Universal Pictures seemed unwilling to release it), there was a lot of money available to make it. The movie is awash in elaborate special effects, sensational sets, apocalyptic scenes of destruction and a general lack of discipline. It’s as if Gilliam sat down and wrote out all of his fantasies, heedless of production difficulties, and then they were filmed - this time, heedless of sense.

The movie is very hard to follow. I have seen it twice, and am still not sure exactly who all the characters are, or how they fit.Perhaps it is not supposed to be clear; perhaps the movie’s air of confusion is part of its paranoid vision. There are individual moments that create sharp images (shock troops drilling through a ceiling,

De Niro wrestling with the almost obscene wiring and tubing inside a wall, the movie’s obsession with bizarre duct work), but there seems to be no sure hand at the controls.

The best scene in the movie is one of the simplest, as Sam moves into half an office and finds himself engaged in a tug-of-war over his desk with the man through the wall. I was reminded of a Chaplin film, “Modern Times,” and reminded, too, that in Chaplin economy and simplicity were virtues, not the enemy.
BY ROGER EBERT

Children of men

It is above all the look of "Children of Men" that stirs apprehension in the heart. Is this what we are all headed for? The film is set in 2027, when assorted natural disasters, wars and terrorist acts have rendered most of the world ungovernable, uninhabitable or anarchic. Britain stands as an island of relative order, held in line by a fearsome police state. It has been 18 years since Earth has seen the birth of a human child.
Watching "Children of Men," which creates a London in ruins, I realized after a point that the sets and art design were so well done that I took it as a real place. Often I fear it will all come to this, that the rule of law and the rights of men will be destroyed by sectarian mischief and nationalistic recklessness. Are we living in the last good times?
There is much to be said about the story of "Children of Men," directed by Alfonso Cuaron and based on a lesser-known novel by P.D. James, who usually writes about a detective. But the story, like the stories of "Metropolis," "Nosferatu" or "Escape from New York," is secondary to the visual world we are given to regard. Guerrilla fighters occupy abandoned warehouses. The homeless live in hovels. Immigrants are rounded up and penned in cages. The utilities cannot be depended upon. There are, most disturbing of all, no children. Only dogs and cats remain to be cared for and cherished.
As the film opens, the TV news reports that the world's youngest person has been stabbed to death in Buenos Aires, because he declined to give an autograph. Theo Faron (Clive Owen), the film's hero, watches the news in a cafe and then leaves with his paper cup in his hand. Seconds later, a bomb destroys the cafe. This is essential: Faron is terrified. He crouches and fear freezes his face. This will not be like action pictures where the hero never seems to fear death.
Britain, as the last functioning nation, has closed its borders, and is engaged in a war between the establishment and a band of rebels who support immigrant rights. Faron is kidnapped by this group, headed by Julian Taylor (Julianne Moore), who was once his lover; they lost a child.
Her associate, Luke (Chiwetel Ejiofor, in another unexpected character), backs her up with muscle and wisdom. Interestingly, there seems to be no racial prejudice in this Britain; they don't care what color you are, as long as you were on board before they pulled up the rope. Julian's group wants Faron's influence to get travel papers for Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey), so the young woman can be smuggled out of the country and to refuge in a rumored safe haven. Kee is a key to the future; the movie's advertising tells you why, but I will not.
The center of the film involves the journey toward the coast, which Faron and Kee undertake with Julian, Luke and Miriam (Pam Ferris), who is both watchdog and nurse. Along the way, they are pursued by Homeland Security troops, and there is a chase scene with one of the most sudden and violent moments I have ever seen in a film. Not all of the chases in all of the Bournes equal this one, shot in a single take by one camera, for impact.
Here again, the action scenes seem rooted in sweat and desperation. Too many action scenes look like slick choreography, but Cuaron and Owen get the scent of fear and death, and nobody does anything that is particularly impossible. Small details: Even in the midst of a firefight, dogs scamper in the streets. Faron's hand reaches out to touch and reassure the nearest animal, and I was reminded of Jack London's belief that dogs (not cats so much) see us as their gods. Apparently sterility affects only humans on Earth; when we are gone, will the dogs still tirelessly search for us?
I have been using Hitchcock's term "MacGuffin" too much lately, but there are times when only it will do. The lack of children and the possibility of children are the MacGuffins in "Children of Men," inspiring all the action, but the movie significantly never tells us why children stopped being born, or how they might become possible again. The children-as-MacGuffin is simply a dramatic device to avoid actual politics while showing how the world is slipping away from civility and co-existence. The film is not really about children; it is about men and women, and civilization, and the way that fear can be used to justify a police state.
I admire that plot decision. I would have felt let down if the movie had a more decisive outcome; it is about the struggle, not the victor, and the climax in my opinion is open-ended. The performances are crucial, because all of these characters have so completely internalized their world that they make it palpable, and themselves utterly convincing.
Cuaron fulfills the promise of futuristic fiction; characters do not wear strange costumes or visit the moon, and the cities are not plastic hallucinations, but look just like today, except tired and shabby. Here is certainly a world ending not with a bang but a whimper, and the film serves as a cautionary warning. The only thing we will have to fear in the future, we learn, is the past itself. Our past. Ourselves.
By Roger Ebert

Equilibrium

Equilibrium is set in the future, in the dystopian city-state of Libria. The film explains how, in the early years of the 21st century, a devastating Third World War breaks out, the impact of which brings civilizations across the planet to their knees. After the war ends, world leaders fear that the human race cannot possibly survive a Fourth World War, and so set about building a new society which is free of conflict.
Believing that human emotion is responsible for man's inhumanity to man, the new leaders ban all materials deemed likely to stimulate strong emotions, including art, music, and literature. These materials are rated "EC-10" for "emotional content" (a reference to the MPAA film rating system), and are typically destroyed by immediate incineration. Furthermore, all citizens of Libria are required to take regular injections, called "intervals," of a liquid drug called Prozium, collected at the distribution centers known as "Equilibrium".
Plot
Libria is governed by the Tetragrammaton Council, which is led by a reclusive figurehead known as "Father". Father never interacts with anyone outside the ruling council, but his image is omnipresent throughout the city in a strong cult of personality. The Tetragrammaton Council strives to create identical lives for all Librians and uses its police state apparatus to enforce unity and conformity. At the pinnacle of Librian law enforcement are the Grammaton Clerics, who are trained in the deadly martial art of Gun Kata, an art which teaches users to predict the actions of opponents during firearm combat. The Clerics exist for the purpose of locating and destroying EC-10 materials and for pursuing, apprehending, and, if necessary, terminating "sense-offenders"—people guilty of feeling emotions.
Despite the efforts of the police and Clerics, a resistance movement exists in Libria, known as "The Underground". Members of this movement are responsible for terrorist activity against Libria, specifically against the Prozium factories. The leaders of the Underground believe that if they can disrupt the production and distribution of Prozium for a short period of time—even a single day—then the Librians will rise up and destroy the Tetragrammaton Council. The Underground operates within Libria itself, but also has contact with resistance groups residing in "The Nethers", the ruins of cities destroyed during World War III. These outsiders hoard objects and artifacts from the old society before World War III, including art and literature. Subsequently, they are the targets of Librian death squads composed of police and Clerics.
The city of Libria, 2072.
The film's protagonist, Grammaton Cleric First Class John Preston, is Libria's highest ranking cleric, and his success stems from his intuitive ability to identify sense-offenders. He is a widower whose wife was executed after being revealed to be a sense offender, leaving him with two children. After a raid on a group of resistance members in The Nethers, Preston notices that his partner, Grammaton Cleric First Class Errol Partridge, has personally taken a copy of the poems of Yeats under false pretenses. Preston discovers that Partridge has not turned the book over for destruction and follows him to a ruined cathedral in The Nethers, where Partridge talks of the loss of everything that makes them human, most notably the right to experience emotions. When Preston argues that emotions lead to jealousy, hatred, and destruction. After quoting Yeat's poem 'He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven', Partridge admits that it is a heavy price to pay, but one worth paying. Partridge then reaches for his gun, forcing Preston to shoot him. Shortly afterwards, Preston accidentally breaks the vial of his morning dose of Prozium, and begins to experience emotions.
Preston is assigned a new partner, the career-conscious Brandt, who claims to have similarly perceptive abilities in identifying sense offenders. Following a standard police raid on a Librian woman, Mary O'Brian, who has stopped taking Prozium, his emotional confusion is exacerbated during her interrogation. Subsequent attacks and raids into The Nethers expose Preston to illegal objects salvaged from the ruined cities. His fledgling emotions are further stimulated by seeing the sunrise over the skyscrapers of Libria and hearing the first movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. He first acts out of emotion when he makes an excuse not to execute a puppy in The Nethers, saying it should be tested for disease, and "if there's a pandemic spreading in the Nethers, Libria should know about it". Preston has by now ceased taking Prozium and is forced to try and maintain his monotone and emotionless facade in front of his son and the increasingly suspicious Brandt. Over the course of the film, Preston's behavior increasingly mirrors that of Partridge in the beginning, even to the point of repeated dialogue.
Soon, Preston is involved in illegal activities, including regular visits to the Nethers. During one visit, he is forced to kill several Librian policemen. Because of the deaths of these policemen, the Tetragrammaton Council steps up its war against the Underground, mounting more raids and ordering that unidentified persons found in the Nethers are "subject to summary destruction". Brandt, having seen Preston re-arranging his desk (signaling a dislike of conformity) and refusing to personally execute resistance members during a raid in the Nethers, becomes suspicious, Preston is summoned before Vice-Counsel DuPont, a high-ranking member of the Tetragrammaton Council. Preston explains that he is attempting to infiltrate the Resistance in order to destroy it. DuPont tells him that he has heard rumors of a cleric attempting to join the Resistance (a reference to Preston's own unreported activities), and Preston promises to find this traitor. Preston unwittingly makes contact with the Underground, who inform him that they have been watching his progress for some time. He agrees to assassinate Father, an act which will create enough confusion for the Underground to detonate bombs in Libria's Prozium factories and hopefully bring down the Tetragrammaton Council. However, after watching Mary O'Brian's execution in Libria's furnaces, combined with remembering his wife's execution, causes Preston to weep uncontrollably. During this clear demonstration of strong emotion, he is arrested for sense-offense by Brandt.
Brandt brings Preston before DuPont, claiming that he has captured the traitor and accusing Preston of not taking Prozium, killing a police patrol in the Nethers, and conspiring with the Underground to assassinate Father and destroy the Council. Preston, however, turns the tables on Brandt. During a previous raid in the Nethers, Preston secretly swapped guns with Brandt, and so informs the Council that the policemen were killed with the weapon currently in Brandt's possession. Brandt realizes that he has been set up and tries to inform DuPont, but is taken away for execution on the orders of DuPont. Apparently cleared, Preston is released. He returns home to destroy his stashed Prozium before police find it, and is confronted by his young son. Preston fears that his son will betray him to the police for not taking Prozium, but he in fact reveals to Preston that he and his sister have not taken Prozium for some time, and has already hidden his cache of Prozium. Relieved, Preston goes ahead with his plan. As part of an elaborate plot formed with the Underground, the leaders of the Resistance turn themselves in to Preston, who persuades DuPont to grant him an audience with Father, during which he intends to assassinate Father and spark off a general uprising against the Librian government.
Preston arrives for his audience with Father, and is advised that as a security measure, he is to have no weapons in Father's presence and is required to take a lie detector test, which he had first encountered with the Underground. Brandt appears and Preston realizes it is a trap. Via a telescreen, Father speaks to Preston, revealing that he has been aware of Preston's sense-offense, and has staged Brandt's arrest in order to lull Preston into a false sense of security and allow him to think that his assassination scheme can go ahead. The face on the telescreen changes, revealing the face of Vice-Council DuPont, who explains that the real Father died years before, and that the Tetragrammaton Council elected DuPont as the new Head of State. He has simply used the image of Father as a political figurehead.
Preston, however, immediately regains control of his spiraling emotions and, using pistols that he has concealed beneath his ceremonial uniform, kills the guards surrounding him. He makes his way through the corridors of the Tetragrammaton Headquarters, killing several dozen guards, until he encounters DuPont and Brandt at DuPont's office, a richly decorated room which reveals that Libria's ruling elite are sense offenders themselves. A sword fight ensues in which Preston quickly dispatches DuPont's elite bodyguards and slices Brandt's face off. Preston and DuPont engage in a final hand-to-hand gun-kata duel with pistols, and Preston eventually manages to disarm DuPont. Weaponless, DuPont tries to bargain for his life with Preston, arguing that Preston, a human being with emotions, cannot kill him, another human being with emotions. He asks if it is a price worth paying. Remembering the execution, Preston replies quoting Partridge: "I pay it gladly", and shoots DuPont. Preston then destroys the telescreen propaganda machines which broadcast across Libria, and the device which projects holographic images of Father. Realizing that the Tetragrammaton Council is faced with a crisis, the Underground detonates bombs in Libria's Prozium factories.
The film ends from different views: Preston's son smiling from his school desk as the Prozium factories explode, Preston's daughter playing at home with the rescued puppy while the telescreens shut down, the leaders of the Underground cheering at their execution as they hear the bombs explode across Libria, and Preston permits himself a rare smile, watching through the windows of DuPont's office as the citizens of Libria riot in the streets, slaughtering police and Clerics, signaling the collapse of the Tetragrammaton Council.
Themes - Gun Kata
Gun Kata is a fictional gun-fighting martial art discipline that is a significant part of the film. It is based upon the premise that, given the positions of the participants in a gun battle, the trajectories of fire are statistically predictable. By pure memorization of the positions, one can fire at the most likely location of an enemy without aiming at him/her in the traditional sense of pointing a gun at a specific target. By the same token, the trajectories of incoming fire are also statistically predictable, so by assuming the appropriate stance, one can keep one's body clear of the most likely path of enemy bullets.
The Gun Kata shown in Equilibrium is a hybrid mix of Kurt Wimmer's own style of Gun Kata (which he invented in his backyard) and the martial arts style of the choreographer. They disagreed on the appropriate form of Gun Kata, with Kurt Wimmer advocating a more smooth, flowing style and the choreographer supporting a more rigid style. Much of the Gun Kata seen in the movie is based on the choreographer's style (movements are rigid and rapid). Kurt Wimmer's Gun Kata is dispersed sparsely throughout the movie, most notably in the intro scene with the silhouetted man (played by Wimmer himself) practicing with dual pistols. Wimmer's intended form of Gun Kata can be better seen in UltraViolet.[citation needed]
Themes - Prozium
Prozium is a fictional liquid drug which suppresses strong emotions, creating a sedate and conformist society. The loss of emotions is a heavy price, but it is considered to be one paid gladly in exchange for the elimination of war and crime. The name could be considered a portmanteau of Prozac and Valium, two psychoactive drugs. Librium is another drug with relaxant effects, often used to treat severe alcohol or drug withdrawal. Prozium was to be originally called Librium (thus the nation of Libria), this was changed to Prozium when it was discovered that Librium - ironically - was already an existing drug.[citation needed]
Themes - Tetragrammaton
The four Hebrew letters יהוה are often collectively called the Tetragrammaton (from the Greek τετραγράμματον, meaning 'four-letter [word]').[5] These four letters are often transliterated as YHWH, JHWH, YHVH or JHVH, pronounced Yahweh, which is one transliteration of the Hebrew "יַהְוֶה", which, in turn, is a vocalization of the name of God in the Bible.