HBO has released the official trailer for its film adaptation of Fahrenheit 451, starring Michael B. Jordan and Michael Shannon, about a dystopian future society, based on Ray Bradbury’s classic novel of the same name. In the plot, history has been rewritten so “firemen” burn books (instead of much more helpfully extinguishing fires) and media is considered an “opiate.”
Jordan plays a young fireman named Guy Montag who becomes woke to what’s going on in society and ends up going head to head with his fire captain mentor, Michael Shannon’s character Beatty. Sofia Boutella (Star Trek Beyond) also stars as Clarisse, “an informant caught between the competing interests of Montag and Beatty.”
Much like Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which is also based on a classic novel, Fahrenheit 451 seems to provide a cheery and not-at-all worrisome look into a potential timeline which may or may not be inspired by our current political landscape — something writer and director Ramin Bahrani has not been shy about discussing.
“I think it’s pretty obvious, right?” Bahrani said when asked why Bradbury’s dystopian story is especially relevant in Trump’s America… “Politically things are going in a very strange direction in terms of what is real and what is not real. I think we’ve been going in that direction for a long time, it’s just now kind of being revealed to us more clearly. So I think from a high level, that’s a problem.”
Find out “why they burn” when Fahrenheit 451 premieres May 19 at 8 p.m.
