The story 'Fahrenheit 451' is set at a time where the whole population is controlled by the government, and this society has a law that says books are treated as being illegal to have. The main character of the story, Guy Montag is a fireman in charge of burning any book that is found at the locations he is sent to. The novel is divided into three sections, the first “The Hearth and the Salamander,' the second 'The Sieve and the Sand' and the third 'Burning Bright.' Each of these sections is a major turning point in the novel and helps to transform Montag’s view of things around him.
Now, the director of the movie, Ramin Bahrani wanted to make a modern version of the 50’s Fahrenheit 451 movie’s version of the future. For instance, they added to the movie modern technology like computers and hard drives instead of the big interactive screens in the novel. These big screens are similar to social media which makes the people of their world addicted to them. With this change, there could be more of an importance on parts where some characters interacted with physical books.
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Another difference between the novel and the movie is that unlike in the novel, Montag isn’t married in the movie. In the novel, Montag is married to Mildred, who is introduced at the very beginning of the novel when she overdosed on sleeping pills. She was then found by Montag which then called an ambulance, who removed all the bad stuff from her system with a big tube and when the next day came she didn’t remember anything that occurred the previous night. Now the reason she was removed was that she wasn’t that important and the movie’s main mission was to get their point across the audience. As a result, the movie only keeps the old woman whom Montag met which was an important character in his transformation in the movie.
Next, in the novel and movie, there is a character called Clarisse, but she plays different roles in each. In the novel, she plays as Montag’s neighbor, who’s a teenager which knows a lot of information on how the world was before the big TVs and laws were made, thanks to her family. For the movie version, Clarisse plays a woman who is older than Montag with a lot of experience in how the world works. One important point is that she dies in a car accident in the novel while in the movie she lives at the end of the film.
Another person that was changed was Beatty, Montag's captain in the fire department who was also his mentor. Beatty was a character that contradicts himself with his view on books. In both the novel and the movie he is shown to know a lot about books whenever he talks with Montag like famous quotes. However, there is a difference in how he is portrayed in each one. In the novel, Beatty is shown to have read books because in a conversation with Montag he recites sentences from a that he gave Montag to look at during one of their jobs that were in progress.
Now, in the movie Beatty is shown in a scene where he takes out a pen and paper, then starts to write things down that would only appear inside books. Beatty is someone who is shown to be strong, but that is only a mask he puts on to live in this society. This is depicted in the end were he and Montag face off. Beatty tries to manipulate Montag to kill him but doesn’t succeed.
Finally, we go on with describing Montag’s differences both in the novel and movie. The biggest change that happened was how the main characters' fate was changed. In the novel, Montag kills Beatty because Beatty tells him he wants to die so he can end his suffering. The story continues in the novel after Montag kills Beatty. Now for the movie instead of Beatty dying, Montag commits suicide by walking into the burning flames which shows that Montag had the resolve to die by his hand unlike how Beatty acted in the novel.
Overall, there are a lot of major differences between the novel and the movie and this is something that happens with almost every book that is made into a movie. There are also other reasons why the directors of movies change some events. Like one reason is that they can’t add all of the information from the book into a two-hour movie if they did it would be very long. The point of movies is to convey the main point of the book in a shorter period. Even though some events were changed the movie expresses how the director prefers to portray the novel with his way of thinking that is special to him.
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