1984

Rating:
Summary: This movie DESERVES to be rereleased--on DVD, preferrably!
Review: Being one of the late Richard Burton's last fims, I was surprised this has yet to be released on DVD.. Even MORE surprised the VHS tape is out-of-print! This is an essential movie, certainly a counterpiece to Terry Gilliam's "Brazil", which was also released in 1985, and is drawn from the same mold as "1984"- as a Criterion Collection volume on three DVD discs, no less...

Also, if this does get to DVD (PLEASEPLEASEDOUBLEPLUSPLEASE!), one treatment it must have, in my opinion, is that it MUST have _BOTH_ scores- Both the original orchestral score the movie was released with, and the Eurythmics' score (which the CD for has been finally reissued- Probably the Eurythmics' best album ever, and essential 1980s album, again, in my opnion), which the orchestral score replaced. One of the beauties of DVD is multiple audio tracks, and a DVD issue of "1984" would certainly benefit the full restoration- Perhaps with as many as 4, maybe 5 audio tracks: movie with orchestral score; movie with Eurythmics score, orchestral score only; Eurythmics score only, and audio commentary.

It is doubleplustime for "1984".

(Note: I have only seen portions of this movie- I've never had an opportunity to see this ever since it came out lo those many years ago, although I _do_ have the Eurythmics CD (I never did find the orchestral score on CD- odd), but what I _have_ seen, and know about this movie, I think this movie is very much an essential movie, and deserves reissue- Especisally in this day and age- 2002- it's more relevant than ever.)

Rating:
Summary: A great film. Why is it unavailable?
Review: This is probably the best film adaptation of a novel, ever. It captures all of the gloom, claustrophobia, and paranoia of Orwell's world perfectly. The casting was great. John Hurt, Richard Burton, and Suzanna Hamilton each fit their roles like a glove.The soundtrack was also excellent. It certainly stands as one of the better films of the last twenty years. So why can't I buy a new copy of it, on either VHS or DVD?

Rating:
Summary: Release it on DVD--NOW
Review: This film is a marvelous adaptation of Orwell's novel! WHEN will it be released on DVD? We're ready for it!

Rating:
Summary: excellent adaptation
Review: This was a peerless adaptation of Orwell's 1984. The visuals of a London crushed under the pressures of war and a war-economy perfectly match the leads. Here, John Hurt plays the hero, Winston Smith, looking as if he hasn't had a good night's sleep or a decent in ages. The state of Oceania, Smith's home, is apparently the descendant of a British socialist state emerging from a WWII that never ended, though the film follows Orwell's lead in not attributing his police state to any one country. Oceania's hapless citizens are continually repressed. The irony? Oceania has no laws - save the free will to break any laws that the state could conceive of. Smith has much to do with this, since he works for the ministry that continually crafts "newspeak", the stripped version of english in which speech comes to resemble some abstract computer language. With its progressively binary quality, newspeak saps imagination from language, paving the way for a society in which even talk lacks imagination. Secretly harboring thoughts of another life, Smith meets and falls in love with Julia, but also courts the dangerous and subversive ideas of O'brien (Richard Burton, in his last role). Ofcourse Smith's rebellion will come to a short and painful end, but not before Smith visits Room 101 where the state will demonstrate its power to crush his will. Hurt's performance is exceptional because his eventual surrender to Big Brother rests not on the state's power to keep him an ignorant lackey, but in light of the explosive ideas that had offered him a way out. An excellent film.

Rating:
Summary: This is a five star movie
Review: I don't understand why anyone would give this movie less than five stars. It is excellent.

Rating:
Summary: Great Adaptation
Review: What a wonderful film; this is pretty much what I saw in my head while reading 1984 back in high school. The only thing it lacks is the note of hope introduced by Orwell in his Appendix on Newspeak (which is written in normal English and refers to the Party in the past tense, implying that Ingsoc eventually went the way of all tyrannies). The tawdry retro-1940s look is appropriate, considering that that the novel was originally titled "1948". And is that voice on the telescreen the same actress who played the official voice in "The Prisoner"? (No; sorry. Sure sounds like her, though.) The music is great as well; the task was split between Dominic Muldowney (who wrote the music of Oceania) and Eurythmics (who provided the music of Winston's "Golden Country").

I agree with previous reviewers that this is about as close as a film can get to reproducing a book onscreen. And what a book!

Rating:
Summary: 2 + 2 = 1 9 8 4...
Review: Orwell's 1984 is rightfully reputed one of the 20th century's must-reads. It is a political shocker that...along with Koestler's DARKNESS AT NOON...depicts the nightmare of the totalitarian state and the mentality that subtends and fosters it. Director Michael Radford's cinematic rendering of the world where BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU is grim and dark.It is a brutal place where POWER is the purpose of existence and cruelty is deliberately exercised to manifest it. John Hurt portrays Winston Smith, Orwell's "everyman" protagonist. His late-awakened struggle for indvidualism tempts him to forbidden scribbling in a diary and an equally forbidden...pathetically pleasureless...liaison with Julie (Suzanna Hamilton) a seeming stalwart of the government-sponsored ANTI-SEX LEAGUE. The doom of these almost-heroes is a foregone conclusion. Their world is totally dominated by THE THOUGHT POLICE. This is the ultimate enforcer of citizen subservience and obsequiousness to the STATE. Richard Burton plays the role of O'Brien, grand inquisitor of the INNER PARTY and minister of TERROR in Room 101, the place where "the worst thing in the world exists" to crush the human spirit. Cyril Cusack has a chilling cameo as Charrington, agent of The Thought Police. His purpose seems to be to ensare uwary citizens into brief moments of contentment. These are sadistically twisted into Crimes against the State. Sheer exultation and triumph in suffering, "the jackboot stamping the face of humanity forever" is the perverse energizing "raison d'etre" of the Governing Oligarchy of 1984. In Orwell's novel, the grimness of the story is...to some extent...offset by the fascinating description of how the totalitarians of OCEANIA came to power. The film lacks this "redeeming" quality (or the implication that a prole-inspired revolution might occur). Radford's bleak, color-drained film is a scary walk through gates Dante said eternally cursed ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE. In the classic brain-washing/torture sequence, Winston Smith is trained to believe 2+2= 5. Or any other Commandment bestowed by the government anti-gods. For viewers who've never read the novel, the film will cause disbelief. Then some might recall films like SCHINDLER'S LIST or TRAFFIC as a reminder of what "governments" are capable. Those who have read the book might see in the film Orwell's bleak vision so well conceptualized, they might indeed wonder if they have visited ROOM 101. It's not a place...or a film...to visit more than once...

Rating:
Summary: You will not find a better movie version of 1984
Review: First to dispel any negative reviews. Naturally any film media can not place the entire book on the screen with maybe the exception of "Hamlet" (1996) ASIN: 078062999X. With anything less than a mini-series. Second is it the story or the philosophy that needs to be transmitted? If you are lucky you get both.

In this case we are lucky because both the basic story and the basic philosophy were transmitted in this movie. An added plus, you could say double plus good, was the portraying the environment as a period piece as described in the book and not as some modern version. They made the 1984 that was envisioned in 1948, not 1985.

To get a review of the book see "1984" by George Orwell ISBN: 0881030368. The movie can stand on its own merit, but knowledge of the book will help fill in the gaps and explain the inferences. Better actors could not have been picked. Richard Burton is in his element.

Think this is not happening today?

Rating:
Summary: Very grim film, well acted.
Review: Grim, moody, and well acted is this faithful film (done in 1984, as the book's title) which shows a man (John Hurt) trying to live a free life in a tyrannical society where freedom is a thing of the past.Richard Burton delivers a great performance as the party chairman who betrays the charecter played by Hurt, to the thought police. George Orwell's book was chilling and this film does it justice.

Rating:
Summary: "We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness..."
Review: Michael Radford's film of George Orwell's novel is perhaps the greatest cinematic adaptation ever made from a well-known literary source, and it stands out as one of the most memorable and underrated British films of the past thirty years. Radford treats the book neither as grim political prophecy nor as Wellsian flight of sci-fi futurist speculation. Instead, we are presented with the ruined world of 1948 as seen through a glass darkly - NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR done straight as a kind of medieval morality play for the post-totalitarian age. The end credits inform us, with but a modest air of self-importance, that the picture was shot "in and around London, April-June 1984, at the exact place and time imagined by the author." And the uncanny meta-fictional parallels don't stop there: the actors are so close to Orwell's descriptions, they practically seem born for their roles.

Resembling a gaunt, ashen-faced figure out of Egon Schiele, John Hurt is ideally cast as Winston Smith. As Julia, Suzanna Hamilton (first seen as a lovelorn dairymaid in Polanski's TESS and then as the paralyzed daughter in BRIMSTONE AND TREACLE) has a haunting and mysteriously stirring presence. Beyond the bluff, two-dimensional gamine of the novel, she brings a genuine warmth, substance, and fascination to her character - a little reminiscent, at times, of a young Harriet Andersson sans the continental coquettishness. Her pale, wiry, broad-hipped body has a simple, unaffected, even startling beauty; and in her more physically revealing scenes (there are many in the film), she radiates all the tactile sensual grace of a nude by Munch or Degas.

The late Richard Burton, featured in his last screen role, is the oracular Thanatos to Hamilton's Eros. As the grand inquisitor, O'Brien, he inhabits this shadowy and inscrutable character with more than just a sly hint of the demon-plagued Jesuit priests he portrayed in THE EXORCIST II and ABSOLUTION. In a maliciously Swiftian twist of irony, the famous Burton voice - the voice of classical drama, of poetry, indeed, of all that is held to be ennobling and edifying about mankind's estate - becomes a subtle and precisely modulated instrument of dehumanization. His death shortly after completing work on the film lends it a particularly cruel and all-too-human pathos. When he says to Hurt, "you are thinking that my face is old and tired...and while I talk of power I am unable to prevent the decay of my own body," the lines in Burton's craggy, weathered face speak volumes for him. It's an exquisite swan-song performance, patient and quietly devastating.

In addition to the superb ensemble cast, much credit is due to production designer Allan Cameron and cinematographer Roger Deakins, who shoots everything in a grainy, desaturated monochrome of blues and greys. The stark high-contrast photography often evokes the power and purity of Dreyer and Bresson, and there is even one extraordinary shot of a battered and delirious Hurt awaiting torture that is an unmistakable homage to Falconetti's famous haircutting scene in LA PASSION DE JEANNE D'ARC. Also notable is Dominic Muldowney's operatic score, an ingenious and even moving parody of Elgar's patriotic overtures and Prokofiev's Stalinist anthems. But it is Phyllis Logan (the star of Radford's first feature, ANOTHER TIME, ANOTHER PLACE, and a supporting player in Mike Leigh's SECRETS AND LIES) who provides the film with one its most caustic conceits. As the unseen voice of the Telescreen Announcer, her incessant nannyish hectoring suggests a more shrill caricature of Margaret Thatcher.

The film is impressive less for its fidelity to its source than its harrowingly vivid sense of realism, and how unobtrusively Radford manages to transcend the faults and contradictions of the novel to create an entirely plausible dystopian vision with a life of its own. That in itself makes NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR a great and original piece of filmmaking - its seamless perfection is still practically unequaled in the English-language cinema of recent years.