P For Provocative

If memory serves me correctly, Alan Moore's V For Vendetta is the first series I ever read by him. I may or may not have picked up a couple of Miracleman issues prior to V, but regardless, it blew my little 12-year-old mind away. I've read it several times, and it has always stuck with me as one of the most powerful comic series I have ever read. Pretty fucked up, sure, but powerful nonetheless. Although I didn't know it at the time, it would be the beginning of life-long love affair with Mr. Moore's work.

Having such high esteem for Moore's stories made me a little leery about what to expect from the movie version of V for Vendetta. And with good reason, since they changed the central thesis of the story. Alan Moore has a huge beef with the movie (even going as far as to have his name removed from the credits), because in his version of the story, V's goal is anarchy. V is struggling against a fascist police state in England and he doesn't just want to overthrow the government, he wants to abolish government altogether. The movie version is different. Some have written that the idea of anarchy has been replaced with one of democracy. Maybe, but I honestly feel that they left it ambiguous. Whatever the case, making something that was glaringly apparent and making it ambiguous constitutes quite a change. So, does that mean they ruined the movie? No, far from it. In fact, I actually liked the movie quite a bit.

Mind you I do have some complaints. The direction was fair to middling and the look of the movie just wasn't dark enough. V's England, as drawn by David Lloyd, was a dark and dreary place that threatened to swallow everything into it's inky depths, whereas the movie had this sort of super-clarity to it even in the most dimly lit scenes. It looked like it was directed by an assistant director of the Matrix Trilogy (probably because it was directed by an assistant director of the Matrix Trilogy, James McTeigue).

So, with all that going against it, why did I like it? First off, the direction wasn't that bad, it just wasn't that great. Second, I thought that it was well-acted. Natalie Portman especially put in a great performance, but the rest of the cast, made up of mostly unfamiliar (to most of Americans at least) British actors were solid as well. John Hurt is always great, as he is again in this film, and Stephen Rea delivered another standout performance as Chief Inspector Finch.

Mostly, though, I enjoyed V for Vendetta because I thought that it was well written. Some may cry heresy, but hear me out. Condensing a sprawling work of fiction into a 2 hour and 12 minute movie has got to be a daunting task, and I thought the Wachowski's handled it admirably. I really thought that the movie was well-paced and at the right moments pretty intense. They story moved along and hit all the right action notes, but never at the expense of character development.

Mostly, though, I think that I enjoyed the movie's ambiguity. I tend not to like movies that spell everything out for you. V, I feel gives you all of the parts and pieces, but lets you assemble them on your own. It throws a lot of big ideas at you and wants you to ask yourself some pretty deep questions.

The character of V has couple of platitudes that drive his actions in the course of the movie. The first is that you can kill a man, but you can't kill an idea. This is not a new theme for movies, and has been explored numerous times in films, from Batman Begins to Braveheart. Nothing new there, except this time around, you are more explicitly asked if when the chips were down, would you be willing to die for what you believed? Again, not a new concept, but nonetheless a worthwhile and challenging one.

Along the lines of being willing to die for one's cause, the character V posits people should not be afraid of their government, but rather the government should be afraid of it's people. To that end, V wages a one man war on his government, murdering officials and blowing up buildings. Make no mistake, V is terrorist. Therefore, the movie asks, can terrorism ever be a good thing? And by extension, do the ends justify the means?

These are bold questions to be asking in world where images of a burnt out Oklahoma City Federal Building, the skeletons of the Twin Towers, and roadside bombs in Iraq pervade our collective consciousness. I commend the movie for asking them, even as the answers scare me to death.

See the movie. Read the book. Make up your own mind as to whether or not the movie was worthwhile. Even those who will disagree with my opinions on the movie would have to agree, that's how V would want it.