Fahrenheit 451 (1966)

Best movie of this year hands down!

everything you have heard about this movie is true.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

A most underrated and under-appreciated film. Intensely melancholic, this is a science-fiction film of understatement, featuring one of the most beautiful scores to one of the most beautiful final passages I can recall. The film seems to slip in and out of focus, in and out of its own story and its this dazed and dreamy tone that makes it such an indelible experience. Truffaut's only work in English, (and the language disconnect appears only to help the dislocated atmosphere), this is a film that will linger long in your memory.

Seen this film countless times over the years, including in theaters the year of its release. Yet it continues to retain its grandeur and eloquent anti-establishment theme, at the same time (perhaps ironically) instilling in viewers a love of books and reading.Many people grow up and old believing when they complete their last year of formal schooling, be it high school, college or grad school, that their education is "complete" and they know everything they need, to get along in the world when in fact graduation is just the start of one's education, and a large part of that lifelong continuous process involves books! About the film itself, there's so much to enjoy: Truffaut's incisive direction; Nicholas Roeg's stark cinematography; Bernard Herrmann's gripping score; Julie Christie's radiant dual roles as Linda & Charisse; Cyril Cusack's fatherly but soulless fire chief; and -- holding it all together with a riveting focus -- Oskar Werner as the robotic "fireman" who eventually rediscovers his humanity and sacrifices everything to keep it.It's astonishing to look at Fahrenheit 451 from the vantage of the 21st century and marvel at the incredible concentration of A-list (for its time) talent assembled in one place for what would amount to pocket change in today's dollars. And out of that modest sum, Truffaut & company crafted an enduring film when more recent "blockbusters" made for 100 times the cost don't survive in our memory past the opening weekend.There's a minimalism to the sets that contemporary film goers, raised in the age of HD, might find lacking but it is more than compensated for by the universality of its message.

For me the best science fiction films don't have to be multi-million dollar blockbusters featuring other worlds, spacecraft or aliens. My personal taste is for recognisably near-future films or TV series where it's easier to imagine yourself in the action and think that, yes, this is just possible in your own lifetime. Especially with older films, it's often interesting to see how accurate the writer or director's future predictions are. "1984" of course stands as the template for this dystopian future depiction but this fine Truffaut film of the Ray Bradbury book also put me in mind of its near-contemporary small-screen counterpart "The Prisoner".Of course the invention of Kindle-like reading tablets renders the premise of "Fahrenheit 451" somewhat useless, but there were several other recognisable motifs in the film which have reverberated down into today, like interactive TV show participation, the ever-present debate on state censorship and the dumbing-down of society.Stylishly directed by Francois Truffaut and superbly shot by the emergent Nicolas Roeg, it's a strikingly visual film, with Roeg's trademark use of the colour red evident everywhere. Red of course is also the colour of fire which is used to destroy the books discovered by the state-run "fire-brigades" sent out on informant tip-offs, one of whose crew, the rigorous, seemingly ambitious Oskar Werner, is the central character whose conversion (or reversion) to an appreciation of literature is the fulcrum of the film.His young wife, played by Julie Christie is deliberately based upon Dickens' child-like Dora in "David Copperfield", the book that turns Werner's character and in an imaginative twist, she also plays the "girl on the train" who seeks him out as a possible convert to the book-people cause. I understand the criticisms of the acting in the film, particularly by the leads as vacant, wooden and stilted but I can allow this given that they are representing almost automatons in the way they live ordered lives, are fed on comic-like "fake-newspapers", state-propaganda TV shows and travelling to work lemming-like in efficient sky-trains.I'm a great book-lover myself, so I lapped up the premise of the importance of literature in our lives but Truffaut never forgets he's making a thriller too. I particularly liked the idea of people becoming living repositories of banned books, although quite how they memorise whole books is one of the harder-to-believe aspects of the story. The ending was suitably enigmatic and reminded me of a similar trick Truffaut's hero Hitchcock employed to likewise striking effect in "The Birds" but there were many other memorable scenes which linger long in the memory in this fine, underrated feature with a now deservedly growing reputation as a genre classic.

This movie is honestly one of the worst movies ever watched. Reading the book twice before I realize it is not even adaptation to the original story with no connection to the actual book itself. Even for the 1960s the acting is very bad. Not only did he change the characters name around pretty much change the entire story and honestly the action and sci-fi inside the movies terrible, it should be considered a comedy rather than a thriller. If this movie wasn't based on the book, and it was an original story probably be good but the reason it's bad is because they change the entire story. This is a laughable experience actually it's probably more funny than any comedy movie I've ever watched in my entire life the special-effects suck in during that time 10 years later Star Wars came out to considering that fact I'm pretty sure this movie sucks. I prescient the fact that they made it but considering they had about $1 million budget in the 1960s I shame on them. The only reason that this is a two out of 10 instead of a one out of 10 it's pretty much just because they made it into a movie. all in all the plot is slow the movies that the special-effects horrible and the story is not consistent with the book. 2/10-Isaac