Everyone drives pick-ups and appears to have watched John Boorman’s Deliverance too many times. The Savage Lands are accessible only by spaceship and are essentially redneck America on rocket-boots. Out in the big bad world, they click and develop a shared fascination with the 'taboo' of monogamy – another moment where the script reads like Tom Baker-era Dr Who sprinkled with extracts from the Joy of Sex. The action kicks in when an unlikely series of events contrives to send the pair beyond the wall to the “Savage Lands”. And like everyone else in New London they are encouraged to routinely pop “soma” – a mood-stabilising drug that comes in brightly-hued Tic Tac style capsules. They are the equivalent of those people on social media with a blue tick next to their name: perceived as inherently superior yet secretly worried they don’t deserve their exalted status. The cast is top notch, with Harry Lloyd (Daenerys’s horrible, wig-wearing brother in Game of Thrones) and Jessica Brown Findlay (Lady Sybil Crawley in Downton Abbey) throwing up sparks as elites in the utopian city-state of New London. If you wondered when television would get around to giving us an X-rated updating of Logan’s Run or Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, well here it is. I was constantly waiting for a big set piece featuring a Teasmade and re-gifted fondue set. It also seems to have been relocated to the naffer end of the Seventies, with its cheesy sex parties and beige colour schemes. Huxley’s vision has been reduced to quaint, often cheap looking sci-fi and the suffocating dread he conjured with so chillingly is largely absent. Anyone who has spent too long on Twitter, where mobs hang about in search of the next opportunity to pile on somebody and receive the reward of a dopamine hit, might argue that this nightmare vision has already come to pass.īut the producers of Sky One’s glossy new “prestige” retelling of the book, which comes to the UK after being panned in America over the summer, have chosen to interpret the story in more straightforward terms.

Aldous Huxley’s 1932 dystopian masterpiece imagined a far future in which people are enslaved to micro-doses of pleasure and where groupthink ruled supreme.

Brave new world movie review