“Justice belongs to those who claim it, but let the claimant beware lest he create new injustice by his claim and thus set the bloody pendulum of revenge into its inexorable motion.”
-- Frank Herbert
-- Frank Herbert
When looking up pictures for this week's Top Ten, I realized that if there's one thing the internet loves more than Batman, it's V. And why not? He's anti-establishment, well-spoken, intelligent, but also physically capable, and quick-witted. His likeness (itself the likeness of Guy Fawkes) has been adopted by Anonymous, the "hacktivist" group associated with many of the cyber attacks carried out today. While I can't stress the irony of this enough (Guy Fawkes was distinctly pro-authority, he just wanted it to be a Catholic one instead of a Protestant one), the re-appropriation of his image has overshadowed the fantastic movie bearing his name.
It is difficult to discuss V for Vendetta without discussing politics, because this is a decidedly, unapologetically, heavy-handedly political movie. The move adaptation trimmed the fat off the source material to tell a rather topical (at the time) story about what happens when the political authority becomes a bit too authoritarian. Released 5 years after the Patriot Act was signed into law, there was a very real fear amongst liberals that it was more than a slight shift towards a police state in America and that undercurrent is present throughout the entire movie and is even alluded to in the tagline "People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people." While the movie could hardly be considered influential (the Patriot Act has been continued and even expanded under a liberal regime), it certainly has ideas worth considering.
To begin, we follow Natalie Portman's Evey (the similar name, E-V to V being intentional) and the ambient dialogue quickly gives us the lay of the this dystopian future-land. The U.S. has torn itself apart with civil war and the U.K. is now a deeply theological police-state complete with curfews. Evey breaks one of these curfews and is saved from corrupt law enforcement by V. Over the course of the movie, we learn just how deeply connected V is to the current government and how focused he is on his quest to bring it down, the moral being that autocracy inevitably creates the agents of its own demise. We also explore themes of religious and homosexual tolerance, with each being surprisingly easy to work into the story, and still remaining today as one of the best examples of each topic being explored in a film ostensibly about something else.
Hugo Weaving does a fantastic job as V, considering his face is completely obscured for the entire movie, yet he brings real emotion to the role. Portman is superb, with her English accent actually being pretty good as well. Director James McTeigue does a great job manipulating lighting in scenes involving government officials to give a surreal quality and keeps the slightly unnerving feeling present throughout the movie without letting it get overwhelmingly bleak. If there's a complaint to be had, it's that as long as the filmmakers were massively overhauling the original story to make it so American-centric, they might as well changed the locale to the U.S. as well, with the aforementioned civil war being a largely punitive way to characterize the country the movie is so clearly aimed at. But this complaint is minor as the movie moves fast enough to keep you from worrying about minor details like that.
On the surface, V for Vendetta is about the titular character's rebellion against the government, but beneath that first layer, the movie leaves you with plenty to think about and examine, letting you apply its message however you like.
On the surface, V for Vendetta is about the titular character's rebellion against the government, but beneath that first layer, the movie leaves you with plenty to think about and examine, letting you apply its message however you like.
A movie with a moral and plenty of one-liners, it leaves you with more to chew on than most action movies