| Rating: | ★★★ |
| Category: | Movies |
| Genre: | Science Fiction & Fantasy |
The futuristic tale unfolds in a Great Britain that's a fascist state. A freedom fighter known as V (Weaving) uses terrorist tactics to fight the oppressive society. He rescues a young woman (Portman) from the secret police, and she becomes his unlikely ally.
Here's some background on V For Vendetta.
Originally, it was a comic book, or more properly, serial graphic novel, by Alan Moore, who also wrote From Hell, The Watchmen, and The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
Before you vomit, remember that Alan Moore himself has disavowed every film version of his work. DC Comics owns the rights to his work, and can therefore make movies if they want, but the movie versions have pretty universally been crap. Although I personally enjoyed From Hell as a movie, it was a TERRIBLE adaptation of Moore's work.
Now, V For Vendetta I will give one thing: it TRIED harder than the others did to be a good film version of Moore's graphic novels; it failed only by virtue of the fact that the Wachowski Brothers, the EXCELLENT gentlemen who made Matrix: Reloaded and Matrix: Revolutions, didn't understand the point of the exercise.
See, in Moore's graphic novels, the point is the resistance to the oppression of an ever-increasingly totalitarian government. In the movie, the filmmakers aren't sure if they want you to feel that, or if they want to blame the Iraq war and President Bush for the totalitarian nightmare of the future. They certainly try to muddy the issue by using "news" broadcasts to describe the situation - saying that the reason the world is all fucked up is because the U. S. "bit off more than they could chew." The fact that anyone living in that society would know that, and therefore not need the handholding of the news broadcasts to remember it, seems to have escaped the Wachowskis; the ham-handedness with which they ladle blame on America diverts attention from the anti-totalitarian nature of the story.
It also suffers from the fact that they dulled-down the villains so they'd be more acceptable. In Moore's novels, the villains were completely reprehensible in every way; the only reason they were tolerated by society was because the citizens didn't know how to resist, and didn't know that they COULD. Enter "V," a masked rebel who promises to overthrow the government, and suddenly society's vague but powerful resentment of the ruling elite has a crystallizing leader to follow.
Not so in the movie. V appears, makes vague pronouncements about freedom being better than secret police and totalitarianism - which, you'd think, wouldn't be necessary - anyone knows they are - but then rescues Evey (Natalie Portman) from a squad of the government's "fingermen," who were planning to do unfortunate things to her for curfew violations. He murders a mouthpiece of the regime, after which takes place the best scene in the film.
The government, of course not wanting to admit that there are terrorists, announces that the man in question died of natural causes; Evey, watching the news, realizes that the anchor herself knows the story is a lie, because she gets shifty-eyed.
That was a dig at the media, and their collusion with a particular ideology that I'm actually surprised made it past the Wachowskis; since the media can at best be described as "hostile" to the right, seeing the anchors willingly colluding with the group in power, despite knowing the falsity of the news reports and the differing ideologies, makes the media look very bad indeed, and most filmmakers these days choose to portray the media and its members as heroic crusaders for truth, despite the total, obvious falsity of such an image.
The movie quickly bogs down because the Wachowskis cannot understand that illogical, unrealistic things are jarring to suspension of disbelief, unless given a context; we didn't object to the insane stunts in The Matrix because we were told from the beginning that it was not reality; we therefore didn't expect it to conform to reality's laws. However, V for Vendetta is set, at least partly, in reality; we are expected by the premise to see the world of V for Vendetta as something that might arise from our own reality, if certain decisions are made, or not made; yet things happen in this movie that are impossible to believe unless they are in the Matrix. Maybe the Wachowskis didn't understand that this is not another sequel, and that it's time to move on.
Sadly, unlike the graphic novels, there is no real underlying ideology behind V For Vendetta, other than that the government is bad; well, ok, but what are you planning to replace it with? No mention is made of any plan to replace the government with something more friendly to the citizens; V's only priority seems to be destruction, which is totally counter to his character in the graphic novels. Obviously, if you haven't read the graphic novels, you won't realize that this wasn't the original intent, but you will nonetheless feel the inner soullessness of this movie; it's unavoidable, as they have characters behave in ways that humans simply don't behave, just to gain a plot point.
At one point, V does something so hideous to Evey that you are left with the feeling that everything that follows in the plot is impossible; those events could have been unfolded in a different way, and they might have worked, but as the film shows them, not a chance. And V's final pronouncement to Evey at the end of the movie betrays his character in a way irreparable by the inevitable Director's Cut; it changes the fundamental motivations of the character in a way so counter to his original intent that, for me, it ruined the movie.
The original graphic novels are a wonderful reading experience; that cannot be said for the movie. Don't buy this. If you just HAVE to, rent it, but be prepared for anti-American propaganda, plot silliness, superhuman powers in the hands of those not superhuman, without explanation; and last, but not least, a total lack of moral understanding on the part of the filmmakers.
You don't need morals to make most movies; but when making a movie about morality, politics, and the moral responsibilities of the citizens, it helps if you have some. Just a thought. Hey! Wachowskis! Stop making movies and go back to film school, because you suck.
