V for Vendetta

Though Alan Moore has (typically) distanced himself from the project (it now says ‘based on the graphic novel illustrated by David Lloyd’ for goodness sake), I’m pleased to announce that V for Vendetta is easily the best-adapted of his work, and an awe-inspiring and challenging piece of filmmaking. Previous adaptations have had varying success – From Hell was fine but NOTHING compared to the comic, which in my opinion was the eighth wonder of the world; The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was entertaining but downright offensive to some, and Constantine was great except for the fact they cast Keanu Reeves as the redhead Englishman.

That Alan Moore has taken offence at Hollywood in general is no surprise, and the fact is he’s a genius at his job, but has no wish whatsoever to aid in the adaptations like, say, Frank Miller with Sin City. But I for one think the Wachowskis and James McTeigue have done a brilliant job with V for Vendetta. They’ve taken the original Thatcherite dystopian vision and linked the narrative with (very) current events, as well as managing to hold off from making a special effects-heavy movie which would have ruined the narrative completely. They have made some changes – the evil government’s actions are a little more blatant here, and our masked hero’s actions a little less extreme, but considering that this was a big studio film, it’s astounding. We’ve had some extremely political films in the mainstream cinematic arena recently (Star Wars: Episode III, Batman Begins), but this is easily the most deliberately barefaced attack on current events that I think I’ve seen in the last ten years or so. Whilst the film is a little less subtle than the source material, and misses out on some of Moore’s most intelligent insights (like V’s definition of anarchy as opposed to chaos), V for Vendetta is challenging beyond my wildest dreams.

Natalie Portman is of course fantastic as Evey, but it is Hugo Weaving who steals the film from behind his mask. He captures precisely the V I imagined from reading the comic – equal parts playful, ruthless, moral and fanatical. Most importantly our masked hero never falls into the ‘Power Rangers’ trap that the Green Goblin did in Spider-Man, instead keeping the eerily grinning façade realistically stable throughout his soliloquies. John Hurt and Stephen Fry join proceedings, helping to keep it thankfully English, despite the fact that the main two actors aren’t, and Stephen Rea has possibly the least enticing task of playing Detective Finch, whose role suffered from the some significant abridgments in the adaptation process.

The film does have a couple of weak points: there are a couple of scenes that almost drag, and could have easily been deep-sixed; and Fry’s character Deitrich doesn’t quite ring true, feeling a bit of a mismatch alongside the film.

V for Vendetta makes very few compromises, and this is a hero we rarely see in comic book movies – he does what he believes is right, not what is good. That distinction is paramount to the narrative, as we witness acts of terrorism and murder in the name of freedom. Thus we are left with conflicting notions of right and wrong, good and evil, and I’m sure this is a movie that will have debate raging for some time.