[movie] "V for Vendetta" (2006)

[siderea]

I finally got around to seeing "V for Vendetta" (2006).

This is a hard film to review for me, because I am so attached to the graphic novel

Comments

[sebastianm]

Now I really want to find the book somewhere today and read it. I suspected that there were layers missing from the film that were in the book just because of tears in the narrative, and the obvious desire to make things as simple as possible (black versus white) in some places, but thought that the torture scene made V a little more ambiguous than the usual action-film hero.

Plus the fact that he dies too -- taking away from the usual "happily ever after" idea, but also adding to his Christ-like identification (helped even further by the chiastic shot of him coming out of the burning prison).

[alexx_kay]

V as anti-hero: In the extra material in the back of the book collection, there's an early sketch by Dave Gibbons. If you take the effort to read the scrawled writing on it, you can see that one of the early ideas for the main character's name was "Good Guy". Hee.

More seriously, the chapter that introduces V is titled "The Villain". Can't get much more plain than that.

Anarchy: Moore said in interviews before the film came out (having read the script) that the word "anarchy" doesn't even appear in the movie. Being sensitized to that, I was watching carefully. In fact, it apears precisely once, as an unimportant background character shouts "Anarchy in the UK!" Well, contrasted with the lengthy discussions in the book, that might as well be nothing.

Vicious Cabaret: The transmutation of that imagery from the book into a Benny Hill sequence was, for me, one of the low points of the movie.

V (the book) as great literature: I think so. Even after decades of marvelous work, _V For Vendetta_ remains my favorite Alan Moore piece.

[sariputra]

I agree with you on this: I enjoyed V for Vendetta, but the book is so much more layer, less cliched humanizing (and thus more human), and some of the utter brutality of V is not there: plus all the religious elements (the gnostic references, the role of the church) were editted out.

I also am ambilivent about the actual politics of V, although it is far more British and less universal than the movie... Alan Moore's statement in the Watchman being something I almost uncategorically agree with.

It was nice to see something not totally destroyed from Moore from page to screen (what happened to both Swamp Thing and League of Ext. Gentlemen were borderline unforgivable crimes against art), but it wasn't V for Vendetta any more than Speilberg's Minority Report had anything to do with Philip K. Dick's.

[handleman]

Keep in mind that I have never read the book all the way through. However, I did notice that the movie had several holes in it. It was trying to say something, but through a gag. From reading this article, I have an annalogy

[hissilliness]

I enjoyed the movie quite a bit, but I actually thought Children of Men was a better adaption of the mood & vision the comic manages to present