Nineteen Eighty-Four

Science fiction started as a literary genre, going at least as far back as Marry Shelley's Frankenstein, written in 1818. However, it's a genre that film adopted pretty much as soon as it was invented, when George Méliès directed the film A Trip to the Moon (or perhaps even earlier). There are some things that each medium can do that the other cannot. I don't think one is better at science fiction than the other, but one thing in particular that film is able to really capitalize on is the spectacle of science fiction. It doesn't necessarily have to be lasers and spaceships and aliens, although that's often the case, but just being able to see and hear the setting as if you were there provides a very different perspective for the viewer.

I'd read Nineteen Eighty-Four when I was in high school, and again during my sophomore year in UB. It's a fascinating political/science-fiction novel, and its arguably still relevant today, despite having been written over half a century ago. Nineteen Eighty-Four takes place in the contemporary future where a government, the Party, is given absolute power over peoples' lives. The Party abuses its power in just about every way imaginable, and it maintains its power through control of the people, and by effect, control of history. The film begins with a quote that accurately describes the Party and its goals: "He who controls the past, controls the future; who controls the present, controls the past."

The novel serves largely as a warning against giving the government too much power, for fear of allowing it to become a totalitarian state, and I feel the film did a good job as an adaption of the novel.

Watching the film, the one thing that struck me the most was what you could hear. Particularly, how often you'd be able to hear Big Brother's or the Party's voice over an intercom. I'm sure it's described in the book as being incessant, or at the very least, it's repeated often throughout the novel. But in the film, it quickly became almost a natural part of the background noise for me, which really sold me on the insidiousness of the Party. Rather than being told or imagining how Big Brother can get into your head, you can hear it for yourself in the film. Even as you watch the film, Big Brother's doctrine is drilled into your own head as if you yourself were one of his subjects.

Additionally, its sparing use of a nondiegetic soundtrack (if it did at all, I don't quite recall) helped establish the absolute barrenness of the setting. The periods of silence contrast starkly with scenes where there's a lot of people and motion, and it shows just how little the people of Oceania really have when you see Winston sitting alone in absolute silence in either his room or his prison cell.