Guy Montag is a fireman. In his world, where television rules and literature is on the brink of extinction, firemen start fires rather than put them out. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden.
Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television “family.” But then he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didn’t live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television.

When Mildred attempts suicide and Clarisse suddenly disappears, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known. He starts hiding books in his home, and when his pilfering is discovered, the fireman has to run for his life.

This latest interpretation of the original novel plays it safe by translating “mindless chatter of television” into “mindless chatter of state mandated social media as delivered by Silicon Valley”. It doesn’t make much sense, only barely holds together, and I still think the original story is much more solid, with it’s society that has a sick fascination with vapid reality television and focuses on how people weren’t going to have freedoms taken away, they would be given up willingly.

I think Michael B Jordan is still looking for a role to really do well in, I’ve yet to see him in a movie that he was able to carry himself. He was good with Sly in Creed, terrible in Fantastic Four (but EVERYONE was terrible in that) and was his character in Black Panther didn’t have to exist at all for the movie to move forward. in Fahrenheit 451 he’s vastly out acted and out performed by the incredibly Michael Shannon, but honestly that guy is a force unto himself, even in his bad roles that guy is just intense like no one else can be.