brainwagon

Well, it’s Saturday again, and once again Carmen and I trundled off to the movie theater. In spite of our misgivings about the state of movies lately, fueled no doubt by the bitter pill that was the steaming pile known as Ultraviolet, it was with some general hopefulness and enthusiasm that I approached the subject of today’s excursion: V for Vendetta. The few comments I had heard of the movie were generally positive, and checking with Yahoo! Movies, I found that critics ranked it as a B, with users being slightly more favorable and scoring it as a B+. Thus, I was predisposed to consider the possibility that it might be good, which can sometimes be rather dangerous when a movie fails to live up to expectation. But on to the movie…

It’s the not-too-distant future, where terrorism and disease have fueled an atmosphere accross the world. In Great Britain, chaos has been averted by the rise of totalitarian state, headed by Supreme Chancellor Adam Sutler (played admirably by John Hurt) who employs ruthless thugs who black-bag dissidents and other undesirables (homosexuals seem high on his list) and generally spends a great deal of time shouting nastiness at his various lackies. The media is completely controlled by the government, and people live in fear.

Natalie Portman plays Evey, a young woman employed at the British Television Network, who is caught on the street after curfew, and would have had a very unpleasant evening of it, were it not for the intervention of V (played by Hugo Weaving, you know, Elrond from the Lord of the Rings, or Agent Smith from the Matrix), a mysterious dark stranger in a Guy Fawkes costume armed with very many daggers.

Don’t remember who that is? Well, my recollections are a bit fuzzy as well. Check out the Wikipedia entry on him. The short version: he was involved in a plot to blow up Parlaiment and the King, got caught and was executed. Among cynical Britons, it is claimed that he was the only person to enter Parlaiment with good intentions.

I don’t think I’ll go into the plot in two much greater detail. It’s actually a fairly grim vision of the future, and one that is played more on the realistic side, with some grim imagery recalling concentration camps and rallies of leather booted stormtroopers. While V himself possesses some super-hero like attributes, people get hurt in this universe. People die in this universe. And anger and hatred seem very real.

If you are looking for something light and fanciful, where the good guys always win, where the innocent are preserved against harm by unlikely rescues, and where good and evil are clearly delineated, you’ve come to the wrong movie. This movie is trying to show us a future to which we all could be headed, driven by fear of a world we no longer understand. It’s not classic superhero stuff.

And at one level, I think it succeeded. It’s not just classic comic book superhero fluff. With that mission accomplished, I’m forced to ask whether it succeeds at the higher level, the level of ideas. Is it thought provoking? Does the story lead you anywhere that perhaps you wouldn’t normally stray?

Unfortunately, I think it’s rather less successful at this level. The characters, while admirably played by the principle actors, remain somewhat nebulous and hidden from our understanding. This is perhaps excuseable with respect to V, but much less so with respect to Evey. We really don’t get any kind of understanding of where she comes from, where she’s going, and what she’s thinking as time goes along. The story must ultimately be about these two characters, and I just didn’t feel there was very much meat to feed the hungry viewer.

That being said, I’ll still give it a solid B rating. The story is unusual, the look of the film quite good, it’s not the normal superhero fare, and I did enjoy the film overall. You won’t ache for more when the light comes up, but you probably won’t be disappointed either.

[tags]V for Vendetta,Movie Review[/tags]

Addendum: This movie is based upon the 1982 graphic novel of the same name by British writer Alan Moore.  From this wikipedia entry:

Moore stated in an interview:

…the central question is, is this guy right? Or is he mad? What do you, the reader, think about this? Which struck me as a properly anarchist solution. I didn’t want to tell people what to think, I just wanted to tell people to think, and consider some of these admittedly extreme little elements, which nevertheless do recur fairly regularly throughout human history.

Perhaps considering this intention of the author, the film might be viewed as a bit more successful.  Ultimately, we are left to consider what we think.  Is V a monster or a hero?  Can anyone really be both?