BRAVE NEW WORLD (2011) - PREVIEW

BRAVE NEW WORLD (2011) - PREVIEW
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio
Directed by: Ridley Scott
Rated: Unrated
U.S. Opening Date: TBA 2011

PLOT

In a future society based on pleasure without moral worries, love is prohibited but casual sex, now called “engaging”, is strongly encouraged. Everyone is kept happy with a legal drug, soma. People are hatched and cloned on conveyor belts to meet the requirements of five different social classes, from ruling Alphas to robot-like Epsilons.

Bernard Marx is a different Alpha male with an inclination to thinking. He and a girl called Lenina Disney go visit a reservation of “savages” where they meet a handsome young man named John and bring him back to “civilization”. John turns out to be the son of the director of the cloning authority, which causes a scandal and makes John a celebrity freak. John falls in love with Lenina but his desire is ruined by his antiquated sexual morals derived from reading Shakespeare. John hates the over-social but anti-emotional civilization, asks to be sent to live in isolation, and gets a job as a lighthouse guard. But even there he can't forget Lenina or escape his celebrity status.

WE SAY

It is obvious what the appeal of this 1932 novel by Aldous Huxley would be to Andrew Niccol, the New Zealand-born screenwriter / director who is writing the screenplay for a big screen adaptation. Niccol has previously tapped into similar territory in his 1997 movie Gattaca , an underrated affair about a dystopian future in which genetic engineering determines one’s place in society.

After all, in retrospect Huxley’s novel seems to be to have been more prescient than George Orwell’s vision of the future with 1984. That is if you’re living in the affluent West and not, let’s say, a dictatorship like North Korea at least.

See if you can spot any of these elements from Huxley’s novel in modern consumerist society today (courtesy of Wikipedia):

The novel begins in […] AD 2540. In this world, the vast majority of the population is unified as The World State, an eternally peaceful, stable, plentiful society where everyone believes everyone is happy. In this society, natural reproduction has been done away with and children are born and raised in Hatcheries and Conditioning Centres. Society is rigidly divided into five castes, which are carefully engineered by these centres. The castes are: the Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons (with each caste further split into Plus and Minus members). Alphas and Betas are the top level of society: they make decisions, teach, and dictate policy. Each Alpha or Beta is the product of one egg being fertilized and developing into one fetus in artificial wombs located on an assembly line in Hatchery and Conditioning Centres.

SOURCE