Veni Vidi Vici: A V for Vendetta Review (contains spoilers)

Found at PosterGeek.

So Winchester Film Society decided to show V for Vendetta tonight as part of their Comic Book Month - showing film adaptations of comics and superhero stories. Next week I have the pleasure of Green Lantern and watching Ryan Reynolds do nothing heroic or likeable for 90 minutes, but for now let's focus on a film that's good. I have watched this film a few times already, have it on Blu-Ray, and it still holds up, even when compared to the superior source material; however, there are some problems with it that need to be addressed.

Based on the Vertigo comic book series (you can say "graphic novel" if you want, if it makes you feel special. And if you're a twat) of the same name by Alan Moore and David Lloyd, V for Vendetta takes place in the near future of the 2030's (because that's very near) in a dystopian vision of London that's about one-part Orwell to two-parts Nazi Germany. Security cameras are everywhere, the streets are enforced by the Fingermen, the government's secret police, and the vox populi is forced to swallow the jingoistic bullshit of Lewis Prothero (Roger Allam), the "Voice of London" - for better context, imagine what would happen if the BBC decided to give any one of the commenters on the Daily Mail's website a primetime TV show. Into this picture comes V (Hugo Weaving/James Purefoy in some shots), a masked terrorist who wears the cloak, stovepipe hat and face of Guy Fawkes, and blows up the Old Bailey on November 5th, a day the country forgot. He declares war on the government as vengeance for what their experiments did to him, and announces he will attack the Houses of Parliament one year from now; in the midst of this, he rescues and recruits Evey Hammond (Natalie Portman), a young woman who starts to wonder whether her masked saviour is vindicator or villain...

In recent years, V for Vendetta has become the number one favourite film for anarchists and libertarians, and V the poster child for the hacktivist organisation Anonymous - how many protesters have you seen wearing that Guy Fawkes mask on top of ordinary clothes? This is as much a reincarnation of Guy Fawkes as a symbol of freedom from repression, and here's the first problem I have with the film. In the comic, Moore and Lloyd devised the story as a battle between the two diametrically-opposing forces of anarchy and fascism, and made clear there was no right side to choose - V was depicted as being insane and ruthless, almost psychopathic, torturing his apprentice for weeks with the intent of making her his successor ("because I love you, and because I want to set you free") and not caring one jot for any innocent lives that got in the way. He pretended to have emotions but he was as hollow as the Guy's painted grin - broken by the government's experiments until he was both more and less than human. The leader of the Norsefire party, Adam Susan (this is a question I wondered about in both the comic and the film - what sane person would elect a party calling themselves "Norsefire"? At best it conjures up image of men in their late-thirties casting +2 Magic at each other. I also wonder how they managed to get voted in since their election rallies are so obviously Nazi-themed it's not even funny), was also shown to have a sympathetic, more pitiful side - he installed a fascist government because he honestly believed that was the best for his people, even denying himself the usual comforts they themselves would be denied, and at the end genuinely wants to reconnect with the public.

"Please allow me to introduce myself. I'm a man of wealth and taste."

So the film's decision to cast it as a basic good vs. evil story rings a bit false. It's all simplified, no real moral ambiguity to speak of - Adam Susan is now renamed Adam Sutler, a combination of "Susan" and "Hitler", just in case you didn't know he was the baddie, and is a tyrannical despot barking orders from behind a screen like Big Brother (although it is a nice touch seeing John Hurt, once Winston O'Brien, play the Big Brother role), importing comforts by train at the expense of the public. The more direct antagonist is Peter Creedy (Tim Pigott-Smith), head of the secret police and "an ice-cold sociopath, for whom the ends justify the means", just to highlight how eeeeevil the government is. Likewise, V is a more romantic ideal of a freedom fighter - cultured, intelligent, excellent swordsman, and made more human (he makes Evey breakfast, he has a mock swordfight with a suit of armour and acts embarrassed when Evey sees him, he appears to be romantically attracted to Evey), he more resembles Edmond Dantès from The Count of Monte Cristo, a comparison the film makes directly, having V's favourite film be the 1934 version with Robert Donat. We're given a clear protagonist and antagonist, and not to say Norsefire wasn't harsh in the comics, but that moral ambiguity between the two figureheads of fascism and anarchy has been virtually swept away.

This makes the decision to keep Evey's torture at the hands of V all the more questionable. Don't get me wrong, I actually like that this scene made it intact. It's a real gut-punch viscerally and emotionally, both the punishment Evey goes through, and the sad story of Valerie Page (Imogen Poots). The reveal still hits like a slap to the face, but it rings a bit false. Prior to this, Film!V has not exactly come out smelling of roses, disguising innocent people as himself and using them as decoys, but he's still somewhat honourable and noble. So seeing Film!V do something this monstrous is a contrast to what we've seen before, and raises the question of why Evey continues to associate herself with a man who tortured her physically and psychologically - at least in the comic we had the possibility of V being psychotic and Evey having her will broken, and Evey as a naïve ingénue. Film!Evey is a smart, opinionated young woman essentially having her personality being rewritten by a masked madman.

This also links to the problem of self-professed freedom fighters and anarchists using Guy Fawkes as a symbol of fighting oppression. It's true that Guy Fawkes was the last man to walk into Parliament with honest intentions, but not many people know what those intentions were. Fawkes wasn't trying to overthrow a totalitarian theocracy; he wanted to create one. Believing that England was under threat from Protestant occupation, and being a sympathiser with the Spanish and a devout Roman Catholic, Fawkes and twelve others sought to destroy the House of Lords and with it restore Catholic domination of the country. It was David Lloyd who decided on V wearing the Fawkes mask, both for visual impact and for the moral ambiguity this created - he and Moore are clever men, Moore having taught himself everything he needed to know, and would have known about this. The film? Less so.

The other albatross around the film's neck is the 9/11 parallels. The comic operated under the politically-naïve assumption that a near-miss from a nuclear weapon would be enough to drive Britain to the arms of fascists, or at least the far right. Can't you tell this was written during the Thatcher years? Because I certainly couldn't! It doesn't show a great grasp of politics or the public by the authors' own admission, but it's preferable to the Wachowski brothers (The Matrix), the scriptwriters, trying to shoehorn in their theories about what really happened at 9/11. To elaborate: Detective Eric Finch (Stephen Rea) is summoned by V, who claims to be a whistleblower under the name William Rookwood (Rookwood being another Fawkes collaborator. You'd think an experienced detective would pick up on this, but whatever). What follows is a massive exposition dump where V helps to outline the real reason behind the St Mary's Disaster - Sutler, then Undersecretary for Justice, and Creedy ordered experimentation on political prisoners, including V, secretly to develop a virus potent enough to kill thousands. They dropped the virus at St Mary's Primary School, whereupon it spread across the country, killing 80,000 people. In order to seize power, Norsefire then blamed this on supposed Muslim terrorists, and now do you see the point? It's a metaphor for what the Bush government did on 9/11! They ordered the attack! They murdered thousands to secure their power! They are all total monsters!

By the end of that plot-dump, I felt myself aching all over from how the Wachowski brothers had beaten me over the head with their point. This is also another plothole - I get that the Norsefire party are meant to be Nazis by any other name but seriously? Are they all a bunch of moustache-twirlers who get their jollies by forcing tramps to fight to the death in secret thunderdomes? Yes, Creedy spearheaded the operation, but there's bound to be many people in Norsefire who would raise their hands and go "Um, isn't this a bit...evil?" Humans are fallible; if Norsefire consisted entirely of emotionless robots, maybe I'd believe it, but humans do have morals. Someone would object to this. No, not some"one"; most of the party would probably object to the slaughter of innocents, much less an entire school of children. I mean Jesus Christ Wachowskis, why did this need to go in? Make your own dystopic film to bludgeon your point, don't write it into a good comic.

What Creedy does in his spare time. He also drinks wine made from the blood of puppies. ADORABLE PUPPIES.

Despite my frustrations and these glaring flaws I've raised, don't think that the V for Vendetta film isn't worth your time, because it most definitely is. It's well-shot, there's clearly a lot of love for the comic there (the TV show Storm Saxon makes an appearance, and it is as crap and racist as you'd expect the television in this world to be), and the set design looks great - all throwbacks to 1950's England with posters for both Prothero's Voice of London program and Gordon Dietrich's (Stephen Fry) vaudeville comedy in that art deco-ish look. Even the font of the slogans and underneath the cameras seems authentic - probably because if you live around London, you've undoubtedly seen these about, on buses, trains, the Underground, and on government adverts. Portman's English accent ranges from South London to South Africa, mostly settling on RP, but she's still sympathetic and likeable as V's erstwhile protegé; and while the villains are evil stereotypes, they're well-acted stereotypes, Hurt giving the right mix of bluster and righteous thunder as Sutler, and Pigott-Smith cutting a sinister figure throughout. Roger Allam in particular should be singled out for how utterly smug and detestable he makes Prothero, despite having little screen time and being depicted mostly as a talking head.

V himself is suitably theatrical, blowing up the Old Bailey to Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, quoting Macbeth as he enacts his vendetta, and of course the V speech. On paper, this comes across as pretentious and smug, like the Wachowski brothers were showing off their vocabulary. Combined with Weaving's charismatic baritone, however, it has its own pleasing rhythm when spoken. The film captures his look so perfectly as to be instantly iconic - a devil in black raiment with a ghoulish porcelain smile and silver daggers at his side, introduced standing in the middle of a stone archway. Director James McTiegue states in the commentary he chose this because it made for a startling introduction, framing him clearly for the viewer, while also throwing him in shadow, indicating he's a darker saviour than Evey accounted for. This trait is fumbled about in the film, but it's a hell of an introduction, and one that has cemented V as something of a modern cultural cornerstone.

(Yes, this is incredibly ostentatious. It is also really really cool.)

And there's emotional weight too, some created just for the film - Dietrich, while so completely different to how he was in the comic (a closeted gay television presenter as opposed to a low-time criminal) that it's another case of Stephen Fry playing Stephen Fry, talks about how the government has forced him to hide his true self, and how he has "become the mask". It's quiet, it's understated, but there's weight to his words, and to his conflict. To say nothing of how heart-rending Valerie's story is; despite her being virtually unknown until then, her suffering is made clear, and her refusal to surrender her dignity, "the very last inch of me", really does hit as hard as it did in the comic. I am so, so glad this scene made it in.

Above all else, however, I recommend this film on the grounds that it was the first real Alan Moore work to be adapted for the screen with a considerable degree of success. Moore's works are notoriously difficult to film (the author even considering Watchmen, his magnum opus, unfilmable), being very dense and layered in such a way that requires re-reading. His comics are designed to show off what the comic medium can produce that no others can, so to capture the spirit of his work in film is a tremendous feat in and of itself. From Hell and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen were so far-removed from the source material they might as well have been different films altogether, but V for Vendetta maintains some of Moore's DNA. It's a film that still raises questions in the audience's mind, that forces them to ask: "What price, freedom?" It's the rare kind of action blockbuster that dares to challenge the viewer to think, to ponder, to stimulate new thought; and if nothing else, that's most definitely worth a watch.