V For Vendetta

Day 216 - 8/4/09 - Movie #212

BEFORE: From assassins to terrorists, and another movie based on a comic book, written by Alan Moore for DC/Vertigo. As an extra coincidental bonus, this movie came up in a trivia round last night, a video round that featured clips of explosions from various films...

THE PLOT: A shadowy freedom fighter known only as "V" uses terrorist tactics to fight against his totalitarian society. Upon rescuing a girl from the secret police, he also finds his best chance at having an ally.

AFTER: This is a tale set in a dystopian-future England - one that has suffered war, plague and terrorism, and whose government has clamped down on citizens' rights in order to protect the populace. A rogue terrorist named V (who might be the subject of government experiments to combat or even create a plague) revives the spirit of Guy Fawkes, blows up government buildings and kidnaps a British-accented Natalie Portman. (wouldn't you?) I found it hard to fully understand his motivations (maybe that's a hard thing to depict) since his theories are full of conspiracies.

There's a part of the film in the middle that I'm just not buying - it suggests that you can make someone stronger by breaking their spirit, that you've got to be cruel to be kind - and vice versa, I suppose. That's no real justification for psychological torture - if V tortures someone, even to prove a point, how is he any better than the secret police in the system that he's fighting? I can see similarities to the other works of Alan Moore, particularly the way the "Watchmen" comic is structured (I'll be watching that film later this week...) but just because someone says that a bunch of events are connected, it doesn't mean that they actually are part of a conspiracy.

There are some important points here about gay rights, human rights, and oppressive governments, but unfortunately they're wrapped up in a terrorist manifesto, which is hard for some people to take. The film had the bad fortune to be scheduled for release in the U.K. shortly after some real-life London bombings in 2005...

RATING: 7 out of 10 angry mobs (it's really a 6, but I bumped it up after some thrilling action sequences late in the film)