John Cusack Movie:

Editorial Review:
Michael Radford's adaption of George Orwell's foreboding literary premonition casts John Hurt and Suzanna Hamilton as lovers who must keep their courtship secret. Aside from criminalizing sex and interpersonal relationships, the ruling party in their country Oceania both fabricates reality and reconstructs history for the sake of oppressing the masses. They brainwash their citizens via large, propaganda-spewing TV monitors installed in their living rooms, which also inspect everyone's activities. Hurt and Hamilton are among the few we see desperately trying to fight the system by keeping control of their thoughts and beliefs. While the atmosphere becomes a bit too stifling at times, the images are quite striking with their muted colors and dilapidated sets. In an interesting bit of casting, Richard Burton costars (in his final role) as a government agent who surreptitiously exposes Hurt to the ideas of resistance. Unlike many like-minded films, 1984 does not offer a flashy vision of the future, but then that aspect makes it feel all the more real. In an age when more and more of our everyday activities are being scrutinized, Big Brother may not be so far off after all. --Bryan Reesman

1984 [Blu-ray] Reviews:
A nightmare worth watching
2008-08-29 - Michael Radford's adaptation of the well-known novel by Orwell is very faithful to its source material and very impressive. The cast is perfect in its leading trio: John Hurt as Winston Smith, Suzanna Hamilton as Julia and last but certainly not least in his last movie performance Richard Burton as O'Brien.

Orwell's dystopian vision of the future will be well known to most of us.
Winston Smith, the central character, lives in a totalitarian world, in which all pay homage to the ominous ever present "Big Brother" and, To sort of keep birth rates at an acceptable level, war is continually waged against some kind of enemy, that seems to change as much as wind direction whatever the fear mongers deem appropriate.

Inhabitants of this world are continually bombarded with propaganda through a kind of two-way TV screens that are present in both the private as well as the public domain. The screens also serve as a way of keeping continuous watch on people as it is forbidden to switch them off

Through the destruction of any sense of history and knowledge that might be identity reinforcing, the masses are being "educated" into being mindless canon fodder.

Love, never mind sex, is forbidden, as it sabotages the goal mentioned above and aside from that all that penned up sexual frustration can be used as a reservoir to tap into and turn into boundless aggression and almost erotic admiration for "Big Brother".

In this mob Winston is consumed and invisible, until he meets Julia and they start an affair, half out of love, half as an act of rebellion against the state. However, from the outside they know their eventual fate and admit to each other "We are the Dead".

The third figure O'Brien comes into the picture when Smith and Julia want to contact a supposed underground resistance movement and they contact him as being a key figure in it. The truth is both shocking and revealing.

Contrary to what some people think, the book was not meant as a criticism of communism per se, but against any form of dictatorship, there are plenty of comments made by Orwell on this subject.

The movie does a wonderful job in bringing not so much uplifting as shockingly hypnotic and intriguing story to life. Orwell envisioned as a location a post-WWII London and Radford very much stayed true to this idea. His city quite obviously is in decay and full of ruins shown in murky colors like WW II archive documentary images. The cinematography is wonderful.

John Hurt is perfect as the worn out Winston Smith being in a state of hopeless and irreversible decay.
Burton as O'Brien is equally unforgettable and merciless; his eyes that offer nothing but the hopelessness of self-awareness, the realization of the insignificance of the individual being grinded down under the boot of the state.

The movie is as merciless as the book, thank God. I consider it the most faithful book adaptation. It was exactly as I imagined it while reading the book.

A masterpiece, still underrated.


Out of print masterpiece...
2008-06-24 - I saw this film when it was first released; it was emotionally and spiritually devastating. I had just finished the book with the knowledge that this was due for release, and felt as if I could not draw breath when leaving the theater. What great actors. I wish this was widely in print; I keep searching for it every few years hoping it will be made available at some point, but it seems not to be. The prices listed are too steep for my blood; the movie will have to live on in memory only. Time to re-read the book!!

Brilliantly concieved, yet fails to grasp the most important concepts of the novel.
2008-06-06 - 3.5/5 - Beautifully crafted sets and spectacular acting are marred by an inability to grasp some of the most important concepts in the novel. Particularily the Novels final, perhaps most crucial chapter.

***Be forewarned I will deal with spoilers of the novel from here-out to illustrate my point.***

I will begin with the single most important concept this film does not deal with, and that is the novels final and most important Chapter. Nineteen Eighty-Four the film almost completely ignores this final chapter. The Bookdoes far more to explain the aftermath of winstons treatment, and this is crucial to our understanding. Granted, the Books end can be perceived very different between individuals. I personally found it redeeming and hopeful of the future. The party meant to stamp the emotion, cognitive ability, and love right out of winston. Instead, they taught him how to really love, think about the world around him, and feel good natured emotion. To become a better man. The Ministry of Love had created in all their efforts exactly what they were trying to destroy. The party was falliable. It might fall, but Winston felt great gratitude towards Big Brother for teaching him these things. Winston loved Big Brother for it. Not in the way the party intended, but would he rise up against them? I do not know. The film did little to express the ideas of this chapter, and I would have had no way of formulating this idea of the novels conclusion based on it. I do not believe any viewer could come to an accurate conclusion of their personal theories of the novels final chapter based on the film. Some changes may always be necessary, even if just for keeping the running length below 3 hours, but this final chapter IMO needed to be shot word for word, scene for scene, in order, with every action maticulously displayed. The film even leaves out the crucial 'I betrayed you' comments by Winston and Julia to each other.

Many other small situational contexts were changed throughout, such as the timing of events, and characters involved. George Orwell set out events in the Book in a particular order for a reason. The changing of the timing of these events blurs the ideas a little, but not to the point of serious detrement. The film does however, botch up dealing with the Brotherhood. Little mention is ever made in the film about the Brotherhood. It was my interpretation that the Brotherhood was organised and controlled by the party. An ultimate form of control. Consider the line in the book referring that the party makes the revolution to establish the dictatorship. None of this was touched upon in the film. Winston does not bring Julia to see O' Brian, and the conversation between the three does not take place in the context of the Book. In fact, a viewer who has not read the Book may not even grasp that O' Brian is claiming to be part of the Brotherhood at all.

There are numerous other little changes I will not touch on. These two are the most important, and most detremental to a film that is among the greatest ever made in the fields of acting and cinematography/directing. The scenes involving a crowd watching the telescreen are classics of cinema.

So my verdict? Do not see this movie if you have not read the book. You will not get an acurate representation of the most important concepts with which to formulate an understanding of the material. Even Winstons time in the Ministry of Love is portrayed on a level minimal to the length of coverage given in the book. Read the book, then see the movie for it's artistic merits and to understand from what direction it was made, filling in the various holes from your previous reading. As a film not based on prior material, it would be one of the greatest films ever made, but it is based on a book, with ideas that crucially must be represented here. Some of the most important, are not.

"All of the confessions here are true, Winston..."
2008-04-29 - If there was any one single book I would peg for being inaccessible to a successful film adaptation, it would be George Orwell's "1984". How could any director bring to life Orwell's cautionary, almost unbearably nightmarish literary dystopia to the screen without screwing up even in the tiniest way? Orwell's body of work is remarkable not only for the scope of his political imagination, but the tiny idiosyncrasies of imagination which make the reader uncomfortable.

Well, kudos to Michael Radford, because he did exactly that, and then some. This is perfect. And I mean perfect in the classical sense; without flaw. I remember first seeing it on the Sci-fi channel as a kid and it lodged in my memory like a tick; the scenes with Winston (played with a kind of wounded, vulnerable purity by Jonn Hurt) and the melancholy monster O' Brien (played with a chillingly resigned, Shakespearean delicacy by Richard Burton) in the party's interrogation/toture chamber are absolutely unforgettable. Despite being his last role while dying of liver cancer, this has to be one of Burton's best performances.

The future is not some paradise filled with new invetions or moving sidewalks. It is an impoverished, shrapnel ridden hell where Winston narrowly navigates his way to something like life, at least inside. His job as a member of Oceania's Party is to destroy the past; he scratches out newspapers, discards photographs of party members (or not), and against his own will takes place in the gigantic Crime Against Humanity that the world has become. Radford's aesthetic sensibilities were perfectly surreal; the telescreen of Big Brother is still, beige and illuminated, and you actually feel as though he is "watching". Orwell obviously took a lot of inspiration from Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia; as Winston and Julia (played wonderfully by Suzanna Hamilton) stand and cheer, the man on the telescreen looks a great deal like Rudolph Hess.

Winston and Julia lose, just as in the book, and badly. Everyone is a traitor (sound familiar?). Burton easily takes Winston in, betrays, tortures and successfully brainwashes him. "Humanity is the Party".

I cannot believe that some of the reviewers here have the guts to claim there are no parallels between this film and our world. Just as in the movie, we are continually lied to about war, who we are fighting, and as O'Brien tells Winston, we are drugged on notions of false "victory". An obvious parallel is that during one week in Winston's Oceania the country is at war with Eastasia, then Eurasia: at one period of time we are at war with Iran, the next Iraq, then as an afterthought perhaps, Afghanistan.

Anyway, this is more than a must see: this is an work of art that cannot be missed in this lifetime.




Why no Re-release???
2008-02-22 - Brilliant acting, screenplay, sets, direction, etc. Obviously very well received and critiqued. Why is MGM dragging their feet on a DVD re-release???