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1984 Movie Review

1984 is a 1984 British dystopian science fiction film directed by Michael Radford and starring John Hurt and Richard Burton. It is a solid, but somewhat lifeless movie adaptation.

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“If you want a vision of the future, Winston,

imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever“

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In a futuristic world which is controlled by an omniscient leader, Big Brother, where free thoughts, feelings and expressions are a sin, Winston Smith commits the crime of falling in love with Julia. This is by far the most famous adaptation of the eponymous George Orwell novel and I was somewhat disappointed with it myself. As a huge fan of the novel, I’d expected a livelier and more cinematic movie adaptation, though what we got here is still perfectly solid, just not great.

The movie is immensely faithful to the source material, which is always a good thing. Whatever the movie did wrong has nothing to do with the script as you cannot really change the original manuscript and you shouldn’t. Plotwise, the highlight has to be the entire third act. The scene with the rat was intense and the whole torturing sequence was both disturbing and extremely tragic just as it had been in the book itself.

The world building is also commendable here as is the whole atmosphere of despair and dread that they so effortlessly conveyed here through the use of minimalist production design and excellent attention to detail. Yes, the cinematography is very dark, but it was actually shot in London and the almost black-and-white photography was perfect for this story. I would have gone with the full black-and-white imagery in a future adaptation as this look here was phenomenal.

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The score is also great and the movie’s usage of many propagandist speeches and especially anthems was impeccable. The dialogue is excellent throughout as expected while the acting is also superb. John Hurt is excellent as Winston and it is easy to find yourself rooting for the poor guy to escape the clutches of this horrendous totalitarian regime. Julia in the film was also quite memorable while Richard Burton as O’Brien was suitably very creepy and even quite disturbing. He was a terrific villain for sure.

1984 is certainly very strong in most of the technical aspects and the faithfulness to the script. Then, what’s the problem here? Well, just the energy of the movie was totally off to me. The extremely slow pace made the movie a slog to sit through whereas on the contrary the novel was captivating for me from beginning to end. This type of story would be perfect for a conspiracy psychological and political thriller treatment, which is unfortunately not what they did here. The movie was filmed in the year of 1984, but you really wouldn’t think it was made then with the exception of full nudity. It was needlessly overly old-fashioned in regards to its pacing and tone. The first half was particularly slow and lagging.

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1984 is a perfectly solid movie adaptation of the eponymous classic novel by George Orwell. The acting from Richard Burton and John Hurt was terrific while the screenplay was thankfully quite faithful to the source material. The atmosphere and the look of the movie were also aptly dark with the production design being particularly strong. My issue with this adaptation is that it’s overly slow in pace, ridiculously so in the first half, and it simply lacked the more modern thriller elements that would have made it more cinematic. I would have personally gone with the political thriller instead of drama approach.

My Rating – 3.5