The 1984 film adaption of 1984 seems to settle for recreating the novel as closely as possible, for people that are already intimately familiar with the book. I would hope that everyone coming to it would have encountered (and actually read) the book at some point; for someone who hadn't read it before, however, I get the feeling that the message would be entirely lost on them just watching this film alone.
Since we live in an increasingly illiterate society, I feel compelled to give a plot summary in spite of the book's massive popularity - 1984 is a dystopian tale drafted by George Orwell in 1948, a vision of the future based largely on the Stalin regime with a dash of Nazism splashed in there for good measure. As such, it can be read solely as a cautionary tale of communism run amok into complete totalitarianism, and thus dismissed as outdated. At the other end of the spectrum, well-meaning but very poorly informed youngsters exposed to the book for the first time like to run around crying "THIS IS WHAT'S HAPPENING IN OUR GOVERNMENT RIGHT NOW!1!", when it really isn't - not quite, anyway.
While Orwell's overall dystopic vision did not quite come to shake out the way he feared, there are elements of society that seem to be using his novel as a playbook for how to implement population control. Take Oceania always being at war with Eastasia for example - George Bush Sr. cozies up to Osama bin Laden and sells Saddam Hussein weapons, and then a decade later his son is declaring war with them and calling them the Axis of Evil or whatever name it was (probably picked up from his regular afternoon viewings of the Power Rangers). Or how about the surveillance state? Orwell's native Britain is an even better example, with something like half a million (I exaggerate not) surveillance cameras in London alone, and two monitoring Orwell's old house 24 hours a day. When you consider massive unregulated databases like the ones ChoicePoint has put together, computer software that is designed to surrepititiously "dial in" to the company that created it with private details about your activity, the push for "universal IDs", and filtered mass media focused on "prole fair" like sports and entertainment to the exclusion of important events, we are perhaps a lot closer to the two-way omnipresent telescreens of Oceania than we would care to admit.
But let's get back to the movie. It does a wonderful job portraying the world and the characters of the book, but seems to stop short there, cutting out much of the meaning and the message of the book. An extremely emaciated John Hurt (the guy who got chestbursted in Alien) looks like he must have fasted for a week to play the role of Winston Smith - despite his skin-and-bones state he attracts the attention of Julia, a cute and fiery young woman who he begins to meet on the sly for trysts where they break all the laws of the Party - sexual encounters, contraband food, possessing writing implements and journals, keeping a room in the proletarian quarters. Julia is played by Suzanne Hamilton who, as others in the scant reviews I've found for this movie have noted, looks amazingly akin to the way Orwell described her in the book. The movie also spices things up a bit by having her be nude for something like 50% of her screen time. Anyway, the plot progresses just about exactly as it does in the novel, though some minor details were changed - nothing that makes for a radical change from what Orwell wrote, but certain things are not developed as much as they are in the book. Some scenes with Julia and Winston, some that I thought were rather important, were excluded, and Julia does not get involved with O'Brien's fake radicalism, which is also drawn out more in the book before the surprise raid in the attic.
The key thing about 1984 is that you understand the parallels to things that are happening and have happened in real life, and understand that it is very possible for humanity to go down this sort of route - so possible that it is chilling, which is why the book has had the effect that it has had on so many people across the world. With the movie, you don't really get that sense. As I watched it I tried to put myself in the shoes of someone who had never read the book or really knew much about it other than "it's that thing with Big Brother", and the conclusion I reached was that such a person would probably take it as a boring and confusing attempt at a sci-fi picture.
A major issue with this movie is the soundtrack. The studio apparently put in a Eurythmics soundtrack for the original release that the director was not happy with. I watched the version released a few years ago, with the original director's soundtrack restored. I have no idea what the movie would be like with random 80s pop going in the background but I can't say that I think it would help it.
If you've read the book already and generally like Orwell this is a nice curiosity piece, but you're really better off reading the book if you're new.
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