In "The Machine Stops," almost everybody lives underground, and we're given hints that the surface of the Earth is no longer habitable. And all of your needs are met by the Machine, which is a kind of master computer that supplies beds, baths, foods, and other comforts and staples — so you never have to leave your little cell. And most significantly for those of us who do most of our socializing via the Internet, everybody uses the Machine to communicate.

At one point, our main character, Vashanti, puts herself in isolation mode for three minutes, so she can talk (basically via webcam) with her son Kuno, who's on the other side of the world. When she goes out of isolation, her room is filled with all of the tons of messages and communications that she's missed over the past three minutes. It really is like Forster is describing turning your IM and Twitter clients back on and being bombarded:

There were buttons and switches everywhere - buttons to call for food for music, for clothing. There was the hot-bath button, by pressure of which a basin of (imitation) marble rose out of the floor, filled to the brim with a warm deodorized liquid. There was the cold-bath button. There was the button that produced literature. and there were of course the buttons by which she communicated with her friends. The room, though it contained nothing, was in touch with all that she cared for in the world.

Vashti's next move was to turn off the isolation switch, and all the accumulations of the last three minutes burst upon her. The room was filled with the noise of bells, and speaking-tubes. What was the new food like? Could she recommend it? Has she had any ideas lately? Might one tell her one"s own ideas? Would she make an engagement to visit the public nurseries at an early date? - say this day month.

Eventually, Vashti and people like her outlaw visiting the surface of the Earth altogether, and as the years pass they begin to worship the Machine which supplies all their needs. And then Kuno warns Vashti that "the Machine stops." Vashti shrugs it off, until more and more things start going wrong — the computer produces mouldy artificial fruit and stinking bathwater, and then it stops providing beds upon request. By the time Vashti realizes that the Machine really is failing once and for all, it's way too late to save herself, or the other humans who are living underground and depending on the Machine for everything.

It's well worth reading "The Machine Stops," not least to contemplate how you'd manage if the Internet suddenly crashed. But it's also fascinating to realize that the first story of computer failure, 100 years ago, predated the first story of robot revolution, Karel Capek's R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) by a dozen years. For some reason, you'd think that we'd have come up with computers turning against us first, and simple computer failure later.

"The Machine Stops" has been adapted into an episode of the British TV series Out Of The Unknown, a 2004 stage play (also broadcast on the radio a couple years ago), and apparently now a short film (see image, up top.)

Top image from the Freise Brothers, makers of a short film based on "The Machine Stops." [The Machine Stops at NCSA Web Archive]

So now that the first two hours of AMC's remake of The Prisoner have already aired, you've had a chance to form your own impressions of the sandy, angsty reimagining of the 1967 classic. (The remaining four hours air tonight and tomorrow night.)

Maybe it's unfair to compare this show to the original — but if the producers didn't want that, they should have called it something different. And honestly, even if you pretend that the original show never existed, this snorefest still wouldn't be winning me over, with its vacuous mysteries and uninvolving plot twists. After reading the comments on my preview post yesterday, I'm aware that some people are really enjoying this remake so far, and I'd love to hear more about what you liked about it. Maybe you'll even change my mind — but for now, I'm still on the side of the haters.

So here are the six main changes from the original that really didn't work for me at all.

6) Humanizing Number 2. I really would have loved to have seen Sir Ian McKellen portraying Number 2 as he was in the original series — especially the Leo McKern version. Instead, we got McKellen playing a much more human figure, who's got a comatose wife and a rebellious teenage son. I can see how this felt like a great idea, because it lets McKellen do more Acting, switching from smiling patriarch of the Village to tormented father and husband. But it also kind of erases the point of Number 2, which is that he's a kind of archetypal authority figure. I also couldn't quite bring myself to care about Number 2's son, and his relationship with Number 2. There was just too much staring into space for my liking.

And when Number 2 managed to be more like the classic version, it was great. The bit where Number 6 says "If I open my mind, you'll take it away from me," and Number 2 responds "Maybe we will. But we always give it back," was great and left me wishing for more of those moments. Why couldn't we have had more of a battle of wills — and wits — between 6 and 2? Which brings me to:

5) Wimpifying Number 6. Science-fiction author Steven Barnes puts it best: This show should have given us Jason Bourne in the Village. If you're going to update the premise, give us an updated James Bond-esque superspy battling against the one enemy he can't overpower: excessive normality and niceness.

Instead, we get a Number 6 who's just sort of a schlubby, ordinary guy, a pencil pusher at some big corporation who resigned because he felt kinda bad about stuff. And nobody even cares why he resigned anyway, they just want him to settle in and live in the Village. It's all a bit underplayed — and because Number 6 is so non-formidable, the Village becomes less scary as well. It doesn't take that much to keep this Number 6 down, and that means the Village doesn't need to muster much power or cleverness.

4) Bringing in the evil corporation. I get it — the Cold War is over, and now the biggest threat to our individual liberty is evil corporations. Which is why they've become such a cliche of late. But the evil SummaKor, the company that Number 6 resigns from, feels like the blandest stereotype of a corporate monster, and we never really fear it. We never really know who's behind the original 1967 Village, but it feels like Brave New World mashed up with 1984. Knowing (or at least suspecting, after two hours) that Enron is the Big Bad this time around just feels a bit cheap somehow. Good job, Ralph Nader.

3) Toning down the surrealism. Every now and then, this show lets rip with the surrealistic, bizarre touches. I love the fact that the only food that you can eat in the Village is "wraps" — it's like my worst airport food nightmare. I utterly adore the psychiatrist and his weird doppelganger in episode two. And I'm completely obsessed with the freaky soap opera that everyone in the Village watches obsessively.

If the whole show had been more like that, I would be singing its praises. But those moments are few and far between, sadly, and the rest of the show feels too pedestrian and, weirdly, too anchored in our reality. There are basically two ways to go with a Prisoner reboot — in an era that's already seen David Lynch and David Cronenberg, you can try to out-Lynch Lynch and go for the full-on crazy. Or you can go for a more conventional spy thriller, of the type Patrick McGoohan would have sneered at. But this show didn't really commit to either direction.

2) Toning down the totalitarianism. The Village should be oppressive and conformist, and above all creepy, with everyone playing their parts with apparent cheer and good humor. Instead, everyone in the 2009 Village seems a bit grumpy, and nobody is particularly subtle about their dislike of the place. It's never entirely clear how these people are being kept down, also — we glimpse the giant balloon, Rover, a few times, but not enough to make the single bubble seem like enough to keep everyone down. Every now and then, someone is dragged off to the Clinic or other terrible locations, never to be seen again — but the Village just doesn't feel powerful enough to keep down the resentment that emanates from every single person in it. These people don't seem to be co-opted enough, for the Village to feel believable. (And generally, the show is so low-energy, that you wind up wondering if people are just too sleepy to fight back against the Village.)

1) That whole "OMG the Village is hollow and I haz touched the sky" thing. When I said yesterday that there was one major change that bothered me more than any other, this is what I meant. We're hit over the head, in those first two hours, with the idea that everyone in the Village believes it's the only place in the world. You might as well believe in aliens as believe there's such a place as New York or London, Number 2 says at one point.

For various reasons, this just doesn't work for me at all, and feels like a really bad decision — if the Village is the only place in the world, then escape really is impossible. And questions like whether Number 6 is a number and why he resigned become sort of academic — the only context in which Number 6 could ever exist is here. It also makes the Villagers seem a bit idiotic, since they never ask the obvious questions like where all their food and gadgets and things come from — we never see enough farms or factories to make all that stuff.

But mostly, it turns the conflict between Number 2 and Number 6 into a debate over whether the outside world exists. Which feels really dull and done to death, in ways that the original 2-versus-6 conflict never did. We've gotten a million stories where people are stuck in an isolated enclave and taught that nothing else exists, and it's one of the dullest plots you can do. Plus, for us the viewers at home, there's never any doubt that yes, New York does exist. So any potential ambiguity or ability for us to identify with the Villagers goes out the window.

But enough of my blasphemous free-thinking critiques. What did you guys think?

We spoke to Scott last year, and he confirmed that he was planning to film Brave New World, but with a screenwriter in place and more meetings happening, it sounds as though the project is being moved onto the fast track.

The Hollywood Reporter's Risky Business blog says Scott and DiCaprio will produce the film through Universal Studios, and "Scott will produce with an eye to direct." And DiCaprio is still on board to star in the project, since he doesn't have anything lined up after he finishes filming Christopher Nolan's Inception. And a writer has been announced: Farhad Safinia, writer of Apocalypto.

THR thinks DiCaprio would play Bernard, who starts to question the decadent, destructive values of the false utopia he lives in. And the Guardian's Ben Child is already raising some worries that this choice will water down the film's dynamic:

I'm aware that this is going to solicit a torrent of posts berating me for suggesting that the film has to be exactly like the book, but in Huxley's tale, Bernard faces the scorn of society because, despite being a member of the elite Alpha Plus class, he is short, like the mindless Epsilons (and also because he adopts an individualist attitude and spurns Soma). The tall, handsome DiCaprio seems uniquely unsuited to play him - an actor such as Philip Seymour Hoffman or Paul Giamatti springs to mind - though it should be remembered that the actor has done a fine job playing troubled outsiders before, notably in Martin Scorsese's The Departed (not so much in The Beach, where his golden boy good looks completely destroyed the book's dynamic).

Since DiCaprio's production company, Appian Way, owns the movie rights to the novel, there's probably no way to keep him out of it in any case.

But it's still tremendous cause for excitement that Scott — a mere couple years after suggesting that science fiction was dead — is now being linked to three projects: the Alien prequel, Brave New World, and The Forever War. Let's hope we see one of those in the next few years. [THR]

The show's director and stars met the press and showed off some clips at a press tour.

The good news? The footage sounds cool. And the show will keep some of the trippy edge from the original, although it's not a straight-up remake. You may want to have some acid handy, says co-star Lennie James (from Jericho.) And "Rover," the deadly balloon, definitely makes an appearance. The bad news? Among the changes is the fact that Number 2 has a rebellious son — bringing to mind visions of Scott Evil from Austin Powers.

Here are the scenes the press saw:

Number Six (James Caviezel) wakes up in the Truman Show-esque Village, and is startled when Number 313 (Ruth Wilson) tells him his name is Number Six now. A cab driver, Number 147 (James) drives him around.

Then we meet Number 2 (Ian McKellen), a popular leader who wears pristine white suits and laughs a lot, and his estranged son, Number 11-12 (Jamie Campbell Bower). Number 313 tells Number 2 that Number 6 feels "alone," and Number 2 says "That's good." Then Number 6 tells 313 that his only problem is that he's being held here against his will.

At first 147, the cab driver, is happy in the Village, but he begins to doubt the paradise he lives in. And Number 6 starts to work on using 11-12's estrangement as a weapon against Number 2.

There's also an intense scene — which may be a dream sequence. Number 6 is tied to a pole in the desert. Number 2 walks up and taunts him by pouring some water on the ground. Then Number 2 puts a grenade in Number 6's mouth, pulls out the pin, and walks away. [IGN]

Six of One, the Prisoner fan page claims that Ian McKellen will play one of the men in charge of The Village, Number 2. Also shooting starts the first week of August in Namibia, South Africa. There will be total of 6 one-hour episodes written by Bill Gallagher (scribe for Conviction).

The original Prisoner followed a former spy known only as Number 6 (Patrick McGoohan) who's imprisoned inside the futuristic town-prison named The Village. Everyone who is taken to this remote location was brought there to keep their knowledge away from the public and to have their secrets discovered by the mysterious jailers. Number 6 can't escape and doesn't know why he's there, and he ends up spending a majority of his time trying to uncover who his captors are.

Yay, finally a new scifi remake that deserves some attention. It's a simple idea that can easily be translated and updated without butchering the plot or ideas of the original. Bring it on I say, especially with McKellen as the crafty Number 2. [Six Of One and Wired]

You could argue that most dystoipan movies are really false utopias, because the rulers of a dark, bleak dystopia (like, say, Brazil) still try to pretend that everything is perfect and wonderful. The difference is, most dystopias start out bleak and dark, and just get more horrid until the protagonist is forced to confront the darkness around him/her. But in the "false utopia" subcategory of dystopias, everything is bright and wonderful, and the main character is either getting some great drugs, or having lots of fun sex, or both in the case of Brave New World.

The "false utopia" genre, says Transparency Now,

shows humanity lost in false paradises of technology and simulation. In one subcategory, we see enclosed high-tech cities or habitations with apparently well-ordered societies full of people who are trapped by their dependence on automation and computers. They may also live decadent lifestyles that serve to distract them from the truth of their circumstances.

Here's a brief and cheerful history of fake utopias:

1909. "The Machine Stops" by E.M. Forster. Forster's reaction to some of H.G. Wells' more optimistic fiction. In the distant future, humans live underground, each in a separate "cell," with all of his or her needs provided for by the all-powerful Machine. Human culture stagnates, and people wrongly believe they can't survive on the surface of the Earth without protection. Over time, people start to worship the Machine like a god, forgetting they made it. And then eventually the Machine starts to break down.

1932. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. It's 2540, and everybody's drugged up to the gills on Soma, a sort of anti-depressant/psychotropic, and people can learn in their sleep. There's lots and lots of casual sex and orgies, and people chanting "orgy porgy" while having orgies. It's awesome. Oh, and people are incubated artificially instead of being born "naturally." The lower classes are engineered to be less intelligent and curious than the upper classes.

1956. The City And The Stars by Arthur C. Clarke. It's a billion years in the future, and humans have mostly abandoned Earth to go off and create super-ultra-awesome minds in space. In the domed city of Diaspar, people lead perfect lives, governed by the Central Computer. When they die, the Computer stores their memories and grows new bodies for them, making them nearly immortal. But then it turns out humans have been lied to about why they have to stay on Earth.

1971. The Futurological Congress by Stanislaw Lem. Ijon Tichy goes to sleep (or does he?) and wakes up in the trippy year of 2039, an utopian era without money or want. Everybody's mood is kept carefully controlled using drugs. Many people have pointed out the similarities of this drug-induced utopia to The Matrix: At one point, Tichy's girlfriend offers him a choice between two pills: The black pill will make him forget their relationship, the white pill will make him commit more deeply.

1976. Logan's Run, the movie based on the 1969 novel by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson. Everything is perfect in the domed city, with all the casual sex and meaningless hedonism you could ever want. Machines provide for all of your needs, but there's one drawback — when you turn 30, you have to die.

1994. The Giver by Lois Lowry. In this award-winning young-adult novel, it's a perfect world: bad feelings and conflict have been eliminated, thanks to perfect communication and drugs. (It's always drugs.) People get around by bicycle, and there are very few cars or airplanes. Romantic love and sexual desire (called "stirrings") are illegal, and are suppressed via medication. Instead, couples are matched up based on compatibility and can adopt up to two children from "birth mothers": one boy and one girl. Here's a Christian review warning against this book based on a misconception that it's actually utopian.

1998. The Truman Show. Truman lives in a lovely small town, surrounded by nice people, with possibly the only job in the insurance industry that doesn't totally suck. The only problem is, he can never leave town, and he's kept scared of the ocean by a fake story about his father drowning. He doesn't realize that everything in his world is a lie, and he's really one of the Pussycat Dolls.

2002. Equilibrium. I hesitated to include this movie, because it's not much of a utopia. It's sort of bleak and nasty, and Christian Bale will do gun-aerobics in your face. But it does have many of the hallmarks, including people being drugged into flat affect-hood.

2005. The Island. Ewan McGregor lives in a utopian community where everything is perfect, and all of his choices are made for him. As usual in these types of stories, everybody's told that the rest of the world is uninhabitable due to some kind of toxic disaster. Everybody yearns to win the "Lottery" and go to "The Island," a tropical paradise — but it turns out The Island is made of people. Sort of.