V for Vendetta is splitting audiences right down the middle. Alan Moore took his name off after reading the script. David Lloyd, on the other hand, quite likes it. Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian gave it a thorough hammering, Philip French in the Observer felt it was clever, handsome but “pompous”, but most of the participants at Harry Knowles’s film festival (where it was first shown) unreservedly loved it.
I’m with Philip French, and in this review I aim to explain why. Major spoilers after the break for those who haven’t read the comic or seen the movie; necessary, unfortunately, for a discussion on where the movie both succeeds and fails.
[Note to comics fans: You may be wondering why I don’t use the euphemism ‘graphic novel’. V was intended as a running strip series anyway, and was not originally intended for trade paperback form, so ‘comic book’ it is. Besides, what you need to do is legitimise the term ‘comic book’, not try and hide it…]
V for Vendetta, in comic book form, is a piece of brilliantly constructed dystopian alternative history, created by Nottingham’s finest comic-book writer Alan Moore and drawn by David Lloyd. It’s set in an alternative 1997, after a Labour win in the 1983 election, and thus nuclear disarmament leads to Britain being one of a very few survivors of a nuclear war; fascists, in the form of a group called ‘Norsefire’, take over the charred mess of the country.
A lone vigilante, the ‘V’ of the title, leads what first appears to be a simple vendetta against the Government officials who tortured him in a medical experiment/concentration camp, but turns out to be after more than that; he wants to bring down the Government and replace it with full on anarchy. In this, he enlists Evey Hammond, a 16-year old girl he’s saved from police, a girl with no real home.
The comic book is a masterpiece of both simplicity and depth; it knows exactly what it wants, and simply shows us how it gets there and the consequences of its actions, via a large number of occasionally confusing but eventually interconnecting subplots. V for Vendetta, in movie form, doesn’t know what it wants to be.
Does it want to be a 100% faithful adaptation of the comic book? Does it want to be a “modernisation”? Does it want to be its own entity with echoes of the comic book? Does it want to just continually Bush-bash with no apparent end in sight? (God knows I love Bush bashing, but do it where it’s appropriate, damn it; there’s a particular crowbarring in of the term “rendition” which hurts badly.) Does it want to be a product placement machine? Does it want to go all the way? The movie tries to answer all of these questions “yes” and thus fails at each and every one of them.
Somehow, a decent movie emerges out of this, although it’s not for want of trying. I’ve read the comic, and I have a copy beside me right now. V’s speech to Evey at the beginning of the comic is:
“Me? I’m the king of the twentieth century. I’m the bogeyman, the villain, the black sheep of the family.”
[V for Vendetta, Alan Moore & David Lloyd, Vertigo edition, p13]
V’s speech at the beginning of the movie is unfortunately the same one that was in the script that Ain’t it Cool News slagged off early in its gestation (warning on link: worse spoilers than me), and it’s just as dire in the movie as it is on page:
“This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is it vestige of the vox populi, now vacant, vanished, as the once vital voice of the verisimilitude now venerates what they once vilified. However, this valorous visitation of a by-gone vexation, stands vivified, and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin vanguarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition.
The only verdict is vengeance; a vendetta, held as a votive, not in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous. Verily, this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose vis-à-vis an introduction, and so it is my very good honor to meet you and you may call me V.”
[V for Vendetta; Wachowski Brothers script]
The Wachowskis obviously have a bad case of verbal diarrhoea. Thankfully, the movie gets better quickly, and by the end becomes something I’ll probably buy on DVD (although in a 3 for £20 offer at Virgin.)
By far the best things about the movie are the places in it where it copies the comic book directly – the entire Evey interrogation sequence is both true to film and to book, as is the Delia Surridge diary. The DP, the sadly late Adrian Biddle (Aliens, The Princess Bride, Thelma & Louise) has managed to capture the look of the artwork very well, whilst managing to adapt it to the confines of live-action filmmaking. The director (the second-unit director on the Matrix films and Attack of the Clones) mostly tries to stay sober and on target in contrast to the fantastical material, and mostly succeeds – with the notable exception of a badly timed and ill conceived CGI ‘knife-time’ sequence, for want of a better word, late in the movie.
A large problem with the script is that V for Vendetta – which is a very English work in many ways – has been adapted by Americans who don’t actually understand what it’s like to live here, and have taken their entire idea of Britain from Mary Poppins, a movie which has rather a lot to answer for. The Wachowskis just get things wrong; the much condemned “eggy in a basket” line is just one of various trivial misunderstandings that make Brits annoyed at American movies set here, including the word “bollocks” in practically every fourth line and an apparent conception that Benny Hill is still the cutting edge of British TV humour. If you can put your mind past it, it’s fine, but if you can’t it’ll completely kill the movie for you.
The major thing the writers do wrong – and this is much worse than the British cultural misunderstandings – is crowbar everything in. The script attempts to kill every single inch of subtlety in the source material – thus the opening sequence is a recreation of the capture and death of Guy Fawkes, Lewis Prothero (in the book, an alluringly trustable “voice of Fate”) is turned into a sub-Bill O’Reilly ranter, there’s the aforementioned Benny Hill reference (complete with “Yackety-Sax” on the soundtrack). V’s favourite film is The Count of Monte Cristo, and Evey gets to spoil the ending. Evey and V’s relationship is changed into a love affair, as opposed to the much more ambivalent book version. There’s heavy handed George W. references which just don’t go. No anarchy, just “democracy” with Tube bombs. No “vicious cabaret”, just good and evil.
Quite a few of the plot changes are, I suppose, necessary; audiences generally don’t understand alternative history and so it has to be put into our “near future” (and not Alan Moore’s original one in 1981), the original “Evey as 16-year old forced into prostitution to buy food” storyline just wouldn’t be possible with the MPAA (they have changed her into a TV researcher played by Natalie Portman), the anarchy stuff wouldn’t go down with the general audience and unfortunately a Sin City-style frame-by-frame reconstruction just isn’t possible with the length and subplottiness of the original work.
Some of it’s incomprehensible: the Dell product placement (when the US is apparently now non-existent as an industrial power in the film universe) is just laughable, and in a fascist state foreign imports would probably be discouraged anyway unless they were from, say, JVC (UK) Ltd. And the ending change, much documented elsewhere, is entirely a Bad Thing, removing the entire reason Evey is in the book in the first place.
You may think I’m being harsh, and I am: V for Vendetta is a decent movie, well directed and well acted and looking beautiful, and I can see why the AICN fanbase loved it. It’s just a bad adaptation. For the defense, one of the additional characters, Stephen Fry as a TV satirist by the name of Gordon Dietrich, is a wonderful addition – it manages to clear up the Evey plotline in the second section surprisingly well, as well as providing some emotional pathos (Dietrich is a closet gay with a collection of suppressed material) of its own. And when they’re simply putting the book on screen it works. Most of the other changes, however, are unnecessary and that’s the kind of change that hurts the most.
V for Vendetta the movie is a very different beast to V for Vendetta the comic, and I don’t think it’s for the better. But the movie is good enough that it will get people to, possibly, take a look at the comic, and if that happens it can only be good for Alan Moore’s royalties, so I’m all for it. Go see, and maybe you might think differently.
F L I C K E R I N G / F R A M E 
Spot on review. Tis a pity they blow up the wrong building at the wrong time and your right the ending is totaly ruined.
Finch’s character is hardly used and seems so disinterested most of the time.
At least Evey’s interegation scene is right though the ultimate outcome of it is missed due to the ending again.
Yeah, some of the plot changes are completely unnecessary (the whole “manufactured virus” red herring being another fine example). Other changes probably are necessary in order to make V‘s already long running time as short as possible.
I’m not sure what could have made it a better movie, apart from keeping the original dialogue – quite a lot of the changes were of the kind required to allow it to make money. Maybe Alan Moore should get more involved in movie adaptations, not less – even if he takes his name off, the movie still wipes off on him, LxG being the most obviously painful example for him.
That way, we’d hopefully get something that might be toned down, but at least is thematically true to the source material. But he’s been burned too often by Hollywood, so it will never happen, and we’ll be watching Brett Ratner’s “Watchmen” by the end of 2008. Gah.
(Sorry about the slight delay in appearance: I have comment moderation on for first comments. You hopefully won’t get the delay again…)
I forgot that I had read the graphic novel back in the 1980’s. I haven’t re-read it yet.
As a result I thoroughly enjoyed the movie. View it, perhaps, as an alternate alternate reality.
I understand that the ‘eggy in the basket’ thing seems to really irritate Brits; I thought the point of that was not to show what you guys (sic) eat for breakfast, but that this was something NOT typically on the menu, and therefore something Evey would recognize as a strange coincidence to see in two (apparently) unrelated households in a short period of time. In some regions here in the US it is called ‘Texas Toast’.
The US is a bigger market than the UK, which is probably responsible for many of the changes in the script–the updating of the original tale and tossing in US-related details. But one of the things I think you Brits don’t appreciate is the impact that this movie is having among those intelligent enough to ‘get it’ here in the US. I and several others I know have long had a sense that something is wrong with *our* country. This film is like a face full of cold water that lets us suddenly see how fear politics is being used in the real world to destroy our country from the inside out. Unlike the film government, our government has not (or, probably not) manufactured the menace–but it exploits it to the same ends.
For that reason alone as a stand-alone work I am grateful for this film, and even for its deviations from the original. The film is a vehicle for something we (in the US, at least) need to hear right now in order to get our heads out of our and possibly clean up the mess created by our recent politics.
The end of the graphic novel to me never seemed credible; Evey didn’t have the requisite skills to fill that hat, in my opinion.
I need a copy of the movie script. Help me out?
There will always be someone out there that lacks taste!
The movie was great and deserves to be on the shelf next to other great movies with a great scripts!
the funny part is it is always someone that never got any further than the front door with there script that downs a movie.
Also I think it would be great to see the governments of all countries get there so called parlaments and white houses and castles blown to bits and then they have to start new because the way it looks now the us is screwed the brits are screwed and any country that has a government is screwed up by that government and the entire nations are in turmoil and the people are hungry for not just food but justice.
(as for people offended by little sayings in a movie grow up or I will club that baby seal :) its time people quit getting offended by simple bs or sayings that make movies great (pssssssssst hey yuppies its only a movie aka fiction but would make a great realistic day to live in)
Actually, Alan Moore admitted that during the first few issues he had no idea where he wanted the story to go. So no, the graphic novel was not quite as full of purpose as you seem to think.
The Wachowskis’ adaptation was a difficult job done exceptionally well. V’s introductory dialogue, for example, is a playful speech that contains precisely 55 (yes, that’s V and V) words starting with the letter ‘V’…which is their way of incorporating Alan Moore’s chapter headings from the graphic novel, all of which were words starting with the letter ‘V’.
Structurally, it’s difficult to balance all the various plot lines from the graphic novel, but the Wachowskis do an excellent job of making it work within the confines of a two hour piece.
In a world where Zack Snyder’s blasphemously literal translation of Alan Moore’s ‘Watchmen’ is considered “visionary”, it’s nice to know there are people in Hollywood who still take their jobs seriously.
I’m with finduilas and kelly miller on this.picking on little things in the movie distracts you from the big picture being presented BY the movie.Fear politics is so much more common than we realise and not just in the US.
People fear their governments when it should be the other way around.