England Prevails

Posted in Mike Wood's blog on ,

A nice review of V for Vendetta for you. I hope you like it.

This could’ve been great. V for Vendetta is an angry story about the overthrow of a British fascist regime, originally written as an attack on Thatcherism and British nationalism in the 1980s. Its central character, V, remains essentially anonymous throughout. He is an idea; the personification of the Vendetta the government has earned from its people. He is literally their creation – the homicidal product of medical experiments conducted on concentration camp inmates. The concept, the message, and the imagery of V for Vendetta all lend themselves to making a really great film.

Unfortunately this isn’t a really great film. Instead it’s a bit of a garbled mess with just enough of the original inspiration shining through to make it worthwhile. The vast story of the Alan Moore and David Lloyd comic is necessarily cut down, with much of the “vicious cabaret” of supporting cast taken out. But whilst extraneous subplots have been removed new, utterly pointless, ones have been added. The film is two and a half hours long, yet it feels shallow. Action sequences are added that seem tacked-on. They’re all well made, but none of them can quite shake the feeling that none of the characters involved have any need to be there at all in the first place.

I don’t object to the changes made to the original because I am against such changes in themselves, I object to them as they often seem to be made for no good reason, and they detract significantly from the politics of the story. Attempts are made to update from the Cold War era of the comic into modern politics, a laudable idea but one that isn’t executed well. As a result the regime’s rise is attributed to a complicated conspiracy theory with numerous plot holes and continuity errors strewn through it. This is both unrealistic and unnecessary. As Moore himself wrote in 1988; it would take nothing as “melodramatic” as this to push England to such extremes.

The upshot of all this is that the fascism involved seems to be not quite out and out fascism; instead it seems merely excessively authoritarian. The concentration camps pictured are the exception, not the publicly acknowledged rule, if the conspiracy theory is to be believed. When the odd references appear to England as a fascist state they simply lazily reference Nuremburg-era Germany. The genius of Moore and Lloyd’s work lay in exposing the possibility of a fascism that was a very English affair. They utilised WWII style-imagery to portray a world where middle-aged men in bowler hats and grey suits condemned thousands to die for being gay, or black. They turned nostalgia on its head to create something both shocking yet also familiar. The Wachowski’s film seems incapable of accomplishing any of this, and tries to short-cut its way to realism with a healthy sprinkling of current political references. It’s a nice idea, but it falls way short of the mark.

Most annoyingly V no longer appears to be an anarchist in the film version. Part of the joy of V for Vendetta was finding something so mainstream that was also so explicitly radical, with lengthy monologues from V on the need for an anarchist society. All of this is gone from the film; giving the impression that V, in this portrayal, is not explicitly political so much as he is simply anti-authoritarian. What was once cutting, controversial, and extremely persuasive, has become slightly banal. This is still a cut above your usual action film, but it’s ultimately very dissapointing.

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