Fahrenheit 451 (2018)

Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel “Fahrenheit 451” was, according to the author, about how much he hated TV. 

Apparently Bradbury thought TVs were melting our brains, and thus their omnipresence in our homes would eventually drive us to voluntarily ban (and burn) books.
Despite what audiences have thought (and English classes have taught), the story was not about censorship, government or otherwise, trying to brainwash us into being TV-controlled sheep. 

But Bradbury wrote his tale in an era without social media: no sprawling networks of data and wiki pages, no instantaneous connection to any peer at any time. 

HBO took a swing at this IP in 2018 with an movie of the same name, but this time updated it with modern concepts, like AI, social media, and the internet (inexplicably renamed “The Nine”). Michael B. Jordan plays the lead of Guy Montag, which makes sense, since he apparently bankrolled the whole thing. That said: there are a few too many “Montag’s flashback” scenes - not a dealbreaker, just a peeve.

Despite other movies that have tried to tell a pre-Y2K story after 2010 (“Ender’s Game” and “The Giver” are two particularly painful examples), HBO/Jordan did a surprisingly good job of updating the story to 60+ years after it was originally penned. Social media and the three remaining books are shown as being heavily emoji’d, with a few quick scenes showing entire sentences with only a word or two left, the rest being replaced with icons. 

Side note: For enjoyable, though unexplained reasons, the story takes place in Cleveland, Ohio, and based on the models of cars being driven, the time frame is roughly “now.”

Like the book, which does a poor job of conveying what Bradbury was actually upset about, the movie also focuses on problems that aren’t about the “evils” of television. Instead, it focuses on how twisted, overzealous social justice and extreme political correctness has driven society into voluntary censorship: white people don’t want to confront a history of racism and slavery; men don’t want to deal with women being socially equal, etc. Instead, people have decided to aggressively ignore the past, and all the writings and social growth that come with, to instead be submerged in a world of flavor-of-the-day social media posts, always-on tv, and Virtual Reality bars. 

This is an HBO movie, which means it’s really not of high enough quality to watch more than once. However: they’ve done an excellent job of updating a classic to include modern tropes and problems, while still holding onto the themes that made the book so good. 
If you have HBO (or any of its apps), I do recommend you lose yourself to this for its 90-minute run time.