In the near future society is managed so that everyone is happy - only a few live on the edges of society as trash. In society, babies are no longer born, they are designed into social categories to decide their future roles. Everyone is happy. However one of the conditioning team, Bernard, can't help but feel if there were any ways of making it better. When a chance helicopter accident brings him into contact with one of the `savages', John Cooper, he brings him back as an experiment. Initially John is taken by the society but gradually he begins to see that the world is not as he wants it.
For a major film to attempt to bring a major novel to the screen is a brave move, but for a cheap TVM to have a stab at it is even more of a risk. This version is kind of interesting in an obvious way, but really is not even worthy of sharing the name of the book (and indeed doesn't really stick to it either). The plot is roughly the same but the film is keen to point out how this future is so very like the current world that many of us in the West now live in. Big deal. This is very obvious and is far too simple a point to make in an attempt to translate Huxley. It is of vague interest on this level and there were certain parallels that made me think - problem was, I didn't leave the film thinking - I ignore the action onscreen and just starting pondering! Films should make you think - but surely not to the point where your thoughts are actually better than what's on the screen!
So yes it says lots of stuff about social classes (which we have - workers and middlemen and top men), consumerism, slogans, media saturation and loss of individualism. But it just doesn't deliver all these in a good package; which it really needed to do in order to get by. As it is, it doesn't manage to really engage and I found myself not really caring.
The cast are pretty low rent to a man - when Nimoy is a surprise big cameo, you know you're in the sh*t! Gallagher is pretty bland and didn't really do anything for me in the lead and support from Kihlstedt is not great either. The supposedly wild and free Cooper is played badly by Guinee; I just didn't care for him or his situation and never really got the feel of a man who is gradually realising that he is in hell. Ferrer was OK and it was nice to see him not playing a sinister creep of one sort or another (although only just!).
Overall this is a passable TVM that makes very obvious comments about our society by exaggerating them slightly in a future setting. This would be well and good but it is certainly never Brave New World. If you are looking for something to wash over you for 90 minutes then this would do, but given the choice again, I'd read the book instead.
