That's because the haughtily emotionless elite of this society accept a tyrannical hierarchy and total lack of personal freedom in exchange for technological trinkets, mood-altering drugs and neon-lit rave orgies. The story begins in New London, where there is no privacy, no family, and no monogamy. It's just ambiguous rather than audacious, carried largely by the characters rather than the concept. Sure, it's not as bold or as audacious or as declarative as other recent highbrow sci-fi shows, but that isn't a bad thing. The creators include showrunner Dave Wiener (Homecoming, Fear The Walking Dead) directors Owen Harris ( Black Mirror) and Ellen Kuras (Umbrella Academy) and comic iconoclast Grant Morrison and they craft an intricately unsettling future - then make you itch to burn it down. I'm not trying to be reductionist: This version of Brave New World is absorbing, uncomfortably compelling and beautifully produced. But that also makes it a little unfocused.
#Brave new world movie tv
By drawing on all the book's various themes, the TV adaptation certainly throws up interesting questions and subtexts. Now nearly a century old, Huxley's vision was perhaps more prescient as we sleepwalk into a brave new world of our own.īut the fact remains: Huxley's vision is somewhat wide-ranging, especially compared with The Handmaid's Tale or 1984 or other dystopian fictions. Huxley, meanwhile, imagined a world of repression rather than oppression, a world where we're all too happy to be distracted from our subjugation. Orwell imagined a viciously totalitarian future, and even today, the mention of Big Brother is never far away as authoritarian governments come to the fore. Brave New World is about genetic engineering, but it's also about social conditioning, and over-medication, or the loss of intimacy, or possibly technology and surveillance, and also maybe socialism is bad?Īldous Huxley's scathing novel came before George Orwell's 1984 and presents a sort of flip side to Orwell's infamous dystopia.
Westworld is about robots in cowboy hats. It certainly adds a dash of cursing, a touch of violence, some Radiohead and a load of people getting their kit off. The new TV adaptation, available on NBC's streaming service Peacock, re-examines the story for a modern age.
I wasn't prepared for how scathingly direct or unsettlingly dark it was, and still is today. When I first read Aldous Huxley's famous 1932 novel Brave New World, I expected something fusty and old-fashioned.
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