Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984)

Based on George Orwell's dystopian novel from the 1940s, the movie was produced in the very year that Orwell had set it, 1984. Horrified by the recent atrocities by the Germans and Russians, and fearing that England and America might take a similar turn, Orwell had painted a frightening portrait of the ultimate dictatorship, and the movie faithfully followed him. Some of the details were: (1) Continual surveillance, in this case carried out by cameras hidden inside television sets. (2) Decaying infrastructure and shoddy merchandise produced by the Party's monopoly of the economy.…

Peter McGinn

7.0

Mar 1, 2021

Do not watch this movie if you are feeling pessimistic or depressed, because the kind of catharsis won’t help you. Nineteen-eighty-four is a bleak movie based on a dark novel that paints a totalitarian world that really sucks. Although they don’t merely tell lies over and over until devotees believe them - instead they actually rewrite historical details in newspapers — still it bears a striking and chilling parallel to the current moment. The acting is excellent and the sparing use of color is very effective, but I felt there were holes here and there details perhaps explained more fully i…

CinemaSerf

7.0

Jan 27, 2025

This adaptation is a fairly faithful, if a little too abridged, version of the Orwellian story of absolute power, sedition and oppression but it's really John Hurt who makes this version stand out. His performance as the weedy "Winston" - a low level bureaucrat in the Ministry of Truth, is visceral as he depicts a character who has found his own way to rebel against the not so benevolent rule of "Big Brother". Everything they do, say - even think, is being monitored and so his life is conceivably now in considerable danger. That is only likely to increase after he encounters the like-minded "J…