Set in a Britain called Airstrip One (which is merely a corner of the larger nation of Oceania), it follows a mid-level civil servant called Winston Smith who’s plagued by doubts about the authoritarian Ingsoc party, its possibly mythical leader Big Brother, and its constant wars with demonised foreign powers. It was a highly didactic text packed with long passages of theoretical exposition about an imaginary future (there’s even a 4000-word appendix), the slimmest of plots, and a small cast of characters who are barely sketched in and not particularly likeable. That couldn’t be taken for granted because, although Nineteen Eighty-Four appears on lists of the greatest works of English literature, and has entrenched itself in our culture (notions like the Thought Police and Big Brother are familiar even to those who haven’t read it), what Orwell wrote in 1949 was decidedly weird by the standards of fiction both then and now. But what’s surprising about Michael Radford’s 1984 is just how well it translated Orwell to the big screen. After all, even the best-known television ad of that year-Ridley Scott’s Super Bowl commercial for the first Apple Macintosh-alluded to Orwell’s acclaimed story. It was inevitable someone would film George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four for the year 1984.
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