V for Vicarious
There are few more rewarding experiences than seeing a visual feast like V for Vendetta on the giant screen at the Cinerama Dome on Sunset and Vine; my only previous experience with said theater was my third outing to see the film version of Rent last fall. The trailers and countless magazine articles about V for Vendetta are ingeniously designed to make even the more skeptical but unquestionably male viewer like me feel guilty pangs of excitement leading up to the film's release, and unlike many overhyped pieces of movie "magic," V delivers to a point that even the disquieting destruction of the lovable Parliament buildings cannot detract too much from the overall thrill of the Wachowski brothers' piece of terrorist fantasy. I found myself agreeing with Roger Ebert, who said, "The movie ends with a violent act that left me, as a lover of London, intensely unhappy; surely V's enemy is human, not architectural." True, for who is his enemy? By the time the conclusion comes to pass, V's enemies have all been vanquished, and the explosive climax lacks the urgency developed by its impending occurrence. I would have liked evidence that Britain was indeed under the control of the totalitarian leadership the film features, or a more solid description of the chain of events the film supplies but does not fully explain. Couldn't V, ingeniously performed (what other word could describe it?) by Hugo Weaving, have had some moral ambiguity, particularly in his relationship with Evey (Natalie Portman), that might have made him more than a lovable terrorist with a questionable message?
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Overall, I enjoyed the pyrotechnics (if not the anticlimactic soundtrack) of V for Vendetta if not the muddle of ideas that fail both to shock or engage an audience so jaded that the idea that the government could have been behind the deaths of so many citizens is not only unsurprising, it simply inspires no feeling on our parts whatsoever. In order to root for V, we should be able to see a foe that seemed to insurmountable that only V could fulfill our vicarious desires for destruction and upheaval. The facile quality of V's overthrow of what we see as an unconvincing fascism detracts from V's heroism, but not from our enjoyment of seeing big buildings blow up magnificently. The 16-year-old boy in me is satisfied; the rest of me feels no great loss. And, for now, that's fine with me.
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V for Vendetta: B-
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Overall, I enjoyed the pyrotechnics (if not the anticlimactic soundtrack) of V for Vendetta if not the muddle of ideas that fail both to shock or engage an audience so jaded that the idea that the government could have been behind the deaths of so many citizens is not only unsurprising, it simply inspires no feeling on our parts whatsoever. In order to root for V, we should be able to see a foe that seemed to insurmountable that only V could fulfill our vicarious desires for destruction and upheaval. The facile quality of V's overthrow of what we see as an unconvincing fascism detracts from V's heroism, but not from our enjoyment of seeing big buildings blow up magnificently. The 16-year-old boy in me is satisfied; the rest of me feels no great loss. And, for now, that's fine with me.
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V for Vendetta: B-