Please don't spend money on this.

Fresh and Exciting

Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

Good, but not great. I haven't read the book but central plot is great. The anti-censorship, pro-freedom-of-expression, anti-fascism, message is a powerful one. However, the story is told in mostly dull and listless fashion. Quite boring to start off with and takes a while to get going. Even once it becomes interesting, it still isn't enthralling. Performances are so-so. Julie Christie is good but the remaining cast are average, at best.Best to read the book, I think.

Fantasist Ray Bradbury wrote FAHRENHEIT 451 about new technology rolling in at the time (1953). His theme was originally a critique of the new media, including television--a medium where, too often, then thinking is done for the viewer. Whereas, with books, effort is involved just in hefting it up and opening the cover; and thinking is involved in reading and comprehending.Unfortunately, even by the time the movie came out nearly ten years later and certainly since, pedagogues had taught young readers it was about censorship. The misunderstanding was so serious, once when Bradbury gave a talk at the college and said his book was a media critique, the students protested that HE was wrong.Try watching this movie (if reading a book is too much trouble) with Bradbury's original theme in mind, and think about society half a century later, where books are often considered passe and we're surrounded not only by an exhausting variety of choices on television; where we can read books online or on downloads; and where we are drowning in Internet social media.As for the movie, Julie Christie is always welcome, as is the underutilized Oscar Werner. Personally, I'm no fan of Truffaut and wish someone else directed the thing. However, I like the hopeful ending. The images of book-burning seem geared more to the alternate/censorship application of the story, but that's a failure on the part of the filmmakers to foresee a time when computers would dominate the reading landscape.Compare the book-burning images to the scene in Pal's TIME MACHINE where the time traveler finds the Eloi have plenty of books--but when he picks one up it crumbles to dust because no one has touched it or bothered to preserve what's in it. That brings you closer to Bradbury's vision.

Almost but not quite as boring as Tarkovsky's "Solaris" (1972), Fahrenheit 451 is a trial to sit through. Dialogue races along at half the speed of light, and it's helped not at all by thick accents.Characters are superficial, cold, and impersonal; I couldn't identify with any of them; maybe that was Director Truffaut's point; so be it, but they might as well have been stick figures. They are almost constantly in motion; their movements are annoyingly hyper. And given excessive dialogue, I can envision a script that must have been a thousand pages. The plot, because it is so simple, is highly repetitive. Yes, we get the point. In the future, a totalitarian regime will burn books to keep citizens from independent thinking.Truffaut seemed to think this underlying theme offers some radical vision of the future. Actually, it doesn't. The Nazis, under Hitler, burned huge numbers of books in bonfires in the 1930s. So much for the science fiction theme.As with most so-called "sci-fi" films, this one has aged poorly. What may have seemed so inventive and futuristic to some viewers in 1966 looks appallingly stodgy, fifty years later. What we have here is a film that tries to be daring and shocking, yet its underlying theme is culturally chronic. And the look and feel of the film reeks of old-fashioned 1960s James Bond.I find "Fahrenheit 451" perfunctory, uninspiring, dull, tedious, and dry. Except for the poor sound quality and difficult accents, it fits perfectly into the stereotypical image of a cheap American made-for-TV movie of the week. At least the run-time renders it less pretentious than "Solaris" (1972).

There was a lot of exposition, especially with the monorail going back and forth, which showed the sheer monotony of the kind of lives the people were living, and could have been cut back.The movie never showed WHY Montag started reading the books that he burned. Was it just the curiosity that Clarisse started in him, or was he already dissatisfied with his life, and was looking for a way out of it? What was up with all of the oranges in the movie? On the breakfast table and in the break room at the firehouse? Plus the orange juice dispenser? I mean I like orange juice, but not THAT often? I don't recall a lot of meat being served in the movie. Was everyone a vegetarian? And just what was Fabian's deal? Was he jealous of Montag's promotion? Of Montag himself? Or was he simply an opportunistic jerk? Oskar I think, was hampered by the stilted dialogue, along with his really BAD relationship with Truffaut, and came across as a bit of a zombie in his relationship with his wife Linda; only really coming to life with Clarisse.I highly recommend the movie, but it does have its bad spots.