NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR: DVD

SYNOPSIS:
Oceania is at war with Eurasia; Big Brother watches from every wall. Screens beam processed messages into every shoddy flat, while loudspeakers blare party propaganda on every street. It's 1984 in a London where Winston Smith (John Hurt) works at Minrec re-writing history; rewriting old newspaper stories to fit the latest corrected truth. When a fellow worker, Julia (Suzanna Hamilton) passes him a secret note with the words 'I love you' they begin a dangerous, illicit relationship, defying the party and Big Brother with their love - and by eating strawberry jam, usually reserved for inner party members (who even have servants). Sniffing around suspiciously is the brutally cynical O'Brien (Richard Burton) from the inner party...And the Thought Police are everywhere.

Review by Andrew L. Urban:
A chilling vision of political correctness taken to its ultimate, bleak conclusion, George Orwell's novel of post war England was, on its publication in 1948, a wail of despair at what the world might have been coming to. Nazism and Communism with a dose of Fascism all are recognisable in Michael Radford's brilliant evocation of a world in which love is illegal, Big Brother is omnipresent and newspeak is eradicating the meaning of words. "War is peace / freedom is slavery / ignorance is strength..." blares the ever-audible loudspeaker system throughout the land. Doublethink is the new principle.

The familiar sloganeering and the eternally invasive party propaganda of totalitarian regimes settles like a brown cloud over the workers, whose dour uniforms are almost invisible against their debris infested surroundings. This is a nihilist world in which only the inner party members can move freely. None can think freely and none can feel freely. As one who spent the first 11 years of life in a terrifying totalitarian Communist state, I can confirm that this film gets the mood shockingly right.

John Hurt, 44 at the time, delivers a gripping performance as Winston Smith, while in his last movie role, a weary Richard Burton is hauntingly effective as an inner party official who is so insensitised he can only relate to people while torturing them. He died aged 59 in August 1984, shortly after making the film, even before its commercial release in October.

Adding greatly to the film's impact is a brilliantly conceived design approach which fuses the elements of the period with items of higher technology such as large TV wall screens and modern helicopters. But it's notions like 'thoughtcrime' that are the most chilling evocations of a totalitarian world whose primary objective is to strangle individuality and dehumanise the populace. That, sadly, is a tendency of those in power that is still with us: witness the dehumanisation of asylum seekers in Australia circa 2000 - 2005 (and beyond).

Published January 5, 2006