Many years ago I discovered Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and it horrified me. The idea of a world where there is a strict genetically determined place for everyone and everyone in their place still horrifies me.

For those who have not read the book or seen one of the various film versions of it, the action takes place in a world which had tried to achieve perfection by abolishing the family. This ‘perfected society banned love, along with history, poetry, literature or anything else that could cause individuals to step out of the conditioning that they had been put through since infancy. It is a world where solitary pursuits are discouraged and the population is distracted into surrendering to their conditioning via a diet of drugs and easy sex.

Into this world, which everyone who lives within it refers to as the civilised world comes a wild man from a place that had been reserved for what they call ‘savages’. The man from the Savage Reservation is brought by one Bernard Marx, an intelligent but otherwise unlucky man, back to London to great clamour and interest which Bernard Marx attempts to exploit for his own ends. However the free man, the Savage, is uninterested in assisting Marx’s attempt to raise his status and John, the ‘Savage’ cannot comprehend a world where love, honour,fealty and family not only do not exist, but are considered as negative values.

Brave New World is to me a story of humans who have tried to lose something of their humanity by trying to perfect their society, it is also the tale of the sort of distopia that comes out of utopian dreams.

Although this film is 3 hours and a bit long it’s well worth watching. It starts slow and some of the book has been shuffled round a bit in order to tell the the story, but it is still an acceptable telling of Huxley’s grim vision of a totalitarian future. This version of Brave New World was made in 1980 and shown on British television sometime around then.

This is a film where I can’t help but find myself on the side of the free man, the so-called ‘savage’, rather than those who have ripped out and disposed of their humanity during a search for alleged perfection.

Hope you enjoy.