See Michael B. Jordan as ‘Fireman’ in Gripping ‘Fahrenheit 451’ Trailer
Michael B. Jordan goes from Black Panther‘s fictional world of Wakanda to a dystopian United States in the first trailer for Fahrenheit 451, HBO’s adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s 1953 sci-fi novel.
In the film, Jordan portrays Guy Montag, a “fireman” whose job is incinerating books as opposed to extinguishing fires. Michael Shannon plays Montag’s mentor in the adaptation, which puts a modern spin on Bradbury’s original work.
“Have you ever seen a physical book before? Do you wanna know what’s inside? Insanity,” Shannon’s character says in voiceover. “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. News. Facts. Memoirs. Internet of old. Burn it. We are not born equal, so we must be made equal by the fire.”
Fahrenheit 451‘s director Ramin Bahrani previously told The Hollywood Reporter, “Bradbury’s novel was set in the future where he was predicting having screens on the wall that you could interact with. Social media and supercomputers like my phone are real now. [The film] is not set in the distant future, like Bradbury’s novel, but an alternate tomorrow where technology is here right now — like Amazon’s Alexa. One of the things in the film is storing knowledge, books in DNA. This exists now. All your drives could be stored 100-fold in DNA. There was no reason to put it in the future; it’s just [set in] a strange tomorrow.”
Fahrenheit 451, the first feature-length version of Bradbury’s novel since Francois Truffaut’s 1966 film, premieres on HBO in May.