I’m off to see a film tonight.
The review: Harry Knowles is a fat idiot.
A stupid fat man said:
I was not prepared for V FOR VENDETTA. This is the most intense cinematic cry for Anarchy since A CLOCKWORK ORANGE. They made the comic. Alan Moore is a bitch for even thinking of bitching about this. It is fucking PERFECT! When you see them promoting it as UNCOMPROMISED VISION. That’s absolutely right. This thing doesn’t give two shakes of a pecker what the modern world is going to think. THEY NAILED IT! You never see V’s face. The voice - PERFECT. Natalie Portman - BRILLIANT. Everybody PERFECT. Adrian Biddle’s last film as DP is a revelation and a revolution! This was my favorite film of the festival. They finally fucking nailed ALAN MOORE! Wachowski’s - do WATCHMEN! PLEASE! When this film opens - this will be a political molotov cocktail. Absolutely fucking great! It isn’t the action film that the first MATRIX was - but it is easily a vastly more important and brilliant film.
I say: (Spoilers! Beware!)
The statement above me is false, or Harry Knowles can’t actually read. I don’t read Ain’t-it-Cool-News, as I loathe Harry Knowles, but this quote surfaced when I was looking into this movie. After reading the comic and watching the movie, I had to point out that everything he said is utter crap spewed out to build this movies credibility to get fans of the comics into the theaters.. Harry Knowles gets paid to write dirty lies. If you want a better "V for Vendetta" experience, get the comic. I am not a comic book snob. Please believe me when I say that if you want a real "uncompromising vision of the future", like this movie is being marketed as, the comic delivers much better.
Having actually read the source material, I can’t see anyone saying this was an "uncompromising vision" with any honesty. It clearly was far less complex, far less bold, and far less deep. It was a simpler version of V for Vendetta that was much easier to swallow. I don’t think that it would be possible to make an actual watchable movie based on the comics that would be completely true to it’s source. There is simply too much there. Too many characters. Too many intersecting plot lines. Too much stuff that works in comic books, but absolutely doesn’t work on screen. You can accept a man running around in a Guy Fawkes mask quoting Macbeth in a comic much more easily than you can on film.
I’ll give them points for trying. It’s probably easier to enjoy the movie if you haven’t read the comics it’s based on. Some of the changes made the story a lot easier to follow. The elimination of a few of the threads in the comic as a compromise in time might be excusable if they didn’t change the very nature of the story. I don’t think keeping the story completely true to the comic would have been possible, but changing things that add nothing to the story is seem pointless.
The whole romantic angle was a departure from the comic in a big way, and it rang very hollow on screen. The point of "V" is that he is an idea, not a man. This makes the movie cliché, "someone must fall in love" impossible, but that didn’t stop them from trying to include it anyway. The whole Matrix inspired fight scene seems extremely dumb and tacked on.It looked like it was used just to put in trailers to sell the movie, as it hardly fit the rest of the film.
Even worse, the call for, justification of, and realization of Anarchy in the comic was almost entirely glossed over. This is the core of the comic, and it’s hardly explained in the movie at all. In the comic, you know why V wants to create his new society, and why it’s worth the fight. In the end of the movie, it seemed as though the people of England were switching one political system for the other for no reason other than the cool masks. The potential for some actual commentary on society seemed completely lost. This was probably my biggest disappointment. Instead of the final scene meaning something, it was just another explosion.
I think they pulled a lot of punches in this movie to make it more politically acceptable and more easily marketable. The comic was written in another time when the word "terrorist" meant something different. If this movie leaves you howling about the controversy, you couldn’t handle the comic at all. The movie turned the actual controversial source material into a slightly edgy superhero movie.
I’d still recommend it, as perverted as it might be from the source material, as it is a decent enough movie to justify watching. If they wanted to promote this as a movie "adapted" from the comic, I’d probably have been better with the changes they made. The fact that they changed things, then have people like Harry Knowles saying they "nailed it" makes me feel like I was lied to.
