![]() Of course, the pre-orgy dance is meant to be part of ordinary life for the characters. We can only assume those scenes are meant to be titillating for viewers, but with their flaring lights they look like bad parodies of disco scenes from 1980s movies. Many of those partners turn up at a club called The Pleasure Garden, a place we see more than once, where a throng of writhing and eventually naked bodies crowd the dance floor. It is absolutely anti-social not to have sex often, with a variety of partners. When he first meets Lenina Crowne (Jessica Brown Findlay), he is officially scolding her for being monogamous, which is against all the rules. At the centre is Bernard Marx (Harry Lloyd), who is ever-so-slightly out of key with his role as a government official. The characters are not given much in the way of personalities, though. The design looks as appealing and soothing as it is meant to be, one of the show’s few effective elements. The show is set in a city called New London, a place of high-rises and glossy minimalist furniture, with a sleeker version of the London Eye in the skyline. The series’ creators clearly knew they’d have to update Huxley’s world, but seem to have been befuddled by what to do with the plot and its technology, and uninterested in developing the characters. Genetic engineering is quickly becoming more a matter of ethics than science. The idea of ‘test tube babies’, as they were once called, has morphed into the valuable process of in vitro fertilisation. Huxley’s book does not, partly because the technology he envisioned as wild and improbable is already here in many ways. Orwell’s message of the government controlling thought and distorting facts through language resonates more potently than ever today. Huxley’s message, of course, was that sameness crushes free will and imagination, leading to even greater unhappiness than before.Ĭlassic though it is, Brave New World has never had the cultural grip of that other anti-totalitarian warning from the era, George Orwell’s 1984. ![]() Everyone is blissfully happy thanks to happiness pills called Soma. Alphas are smart and privileged Epsilons are dim-witted worker bees. Sameness reigns, in a world where babies are engineered in factories and assigned grades according to their status. Like the book, the series is set in a dystopia disguised as a utopia. The boredom sets in early on and never goes away in the splashy new adaptation of Brave New World, based on Aldous Huxley’s then-futuristic novel, published in 1932. Meanwhile, a miscommunicative love affair begins between John and Lenina.When even the orgies are dull, you know a television series is in trouble. A social experiment begins, monitoring how John fares in the brave new world into which he's been thrust. John is the Director's son, and, because the concepts of mothers and fathers is considered backward in the World State, Bernard realizes that he can use John and Linda's existence to blackmail the Director.Īnd so, Lenina and Bernard bring John and Linda back to the U.K., where Bernard begins to exhibit the Shakespeare-quoting John as a psychological oddity. As it turns out, Linda was stranded on the Reservation some years earlier, during a visit with the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning. There they meet John, a white man born on the Reservation, and his mother, Linda. Lenina and Bernard, a Hatchery worker and a psychologist, travel to the Savage Reservation in New Mexico, where live Native Americans who refused to conform to the World State. The assembly-line procreation process is also used to maintain the World State's status quo, with the lowest castes fed teratogens and deprived of oxygen as fetuses. The nuclear family has been replaced by state-run Hatcheries, which breed, feed, and educate babies in large batches, without the need for pregnancy and labor. Ford be praised!Īldous Huxley's 1932 dystopian novella, Brave New World, takes place in an ultra-automated version of the U.K., where disease, unrest, and even negative feelings have been eradicated through technological advancement. Get your soma supplies ready, book nerds, because a Brave New World TV show is on its way to the Syfy Channel.
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