

If you feel things about these characters or wonder what happens next, that's not because of the book. More importantly, the strength of the actors makes you feel like some version of this is real.
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As a TV show, Brave New World's strength is in the fact that superficially, it looks great.


If you squint, Peacock's take on Brave New World is like if millennial Han Solo and Sybil from Downton Abbey were in a nine-part version of a Black Mirror episode that was like if Westworld Season 3 didn't make you want to drink heavily. If you thought she was good in the Black Mirror episode "Fifteen Million Merits," she's three times as good in Brave New World. Jessica Findlay Brown is also fantastic as Lenina Crown. Anyone who saw Ehrenreich in Hail, Ceasar! will know that this is his gift. Meanwhile, a character literally named John the Savage (Alden Ehrenreich, aka, Han Solo) threatens the status quo from without.Īlden Ehrenreich in 'Brave New World.' PeacockĮhrenreich's take on this character is inherently more interesting than anything from the original novel because he plays John the Savage as naturalistically as possible. In each case, an oppressive "Utopia" is shaken-up by the more "savage" outsider - or an insider becomes woke about life beyond their bubble.īrave New World has both kinds of characters, Lenina Crown (Jessica Findlay Brown) and Bernard Marx (Harry Lloyd ) are questioning the system from within. In Zardoz, savages exist outside of similarly protected cities, but those inside the cities are forced to live forever.
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In the movie version of Logan's Run, respectable people can't leave the "Dome," but are also required to die at 30 years old. This combo occurs a lot in pop sci-fi but differs in the details. The Savage Lands in Brave New World represents class warfare as a mode of oppression or more broadly, "Utopias" that contain "Dystopias." In other words, you don't start reading Brave New World and say to yourself, "Wow, this society seems great," any more than you watch Snowpiercer and think all the people living in the front of the train are totally normal. In her 2011 book, In Other Worlds, Margaret Atwood explored how this works in her essay "The Roads to Ustopia." Atwood argues that throughout her career she has written several literary utopias and dystopia but that, she likes to use the word "Ustopia" because "in my opinion, each contains a latent version of the other."Īt the risk of reducing Atwood's ideas to one sentence, what she argues is that calling something a "Utopia" or "Dystopia" only gets you so far because really, you have to figure out what the ideological map of that story looks like. Brave New World is perhaps the best example of this: It presents a "Utopian" society that's actually a "Dystopia," making it both a study of so-called utopian ideals and also a critique of those ideals. Two of the worst things that ever happened to science fiction were the words "dystopia" and "utopia." The reductive nature of these words ruined countless discussions about different varieties of sci-fi and gave dummy intellectual ammunition to all sorts of debates about the meaning different sci-fi universes from The Handmaid's Tale to Star Trek to Black Mirror to Brave New World.ĭebating whether or not any science fiction falls into a "utopia" is pointless because doing so implies too much intent on the part of the creator. Light spoilers ahead for Brave New World the novel (1932) and Brave New World Season 1(2020). Brave New World is good because every single adaptation of Brave New World - from the radio plays of 1956 to the 1998 TV movie starring Leonard Nimoy - all have one thing in common: They're all better than the book.
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But each new hot take about Peacock's big sci-fi series kind of misses the point. A smattering of reviews on Rotten Tomatoes will make you think this show is either Westworld for dumb people or a decent-yet-self-conscious remake of Logan's Run - but with even more gratuitous nudity. Nobody can agree on the new TV series Brave New World.
