Despite the ridiculous presence of Dell flat-screen monitors and JVC home entertainment centers and the discomfiting fact that every living room in the future, even the fugitive apartments with cinder block bookshelves, looks like a page out of an IKEA catalog, the film adaptation of V for Vendetta is literate and gleefully subversive. Granted, it is not Alan Moore’s comic, as the color schemes alone will reveal. But it is a reimagining and an updating of the narrative. (One can still see the poster for White Heat still in the back of V’s lair.) And it more than atones for previous lackluster Alan Moore adaptations. The film takes about 30 minutes to get its groove and John Hurt’s video presence grows tedious. But this is a film that, unlike the last two Matrix films, is taut and, at times, quite visceral. The two dependable Stephens (Rea and Fry) in the supporting cast are also of great benefit. Joe Bob says check it out.
dissenting grumble: fascistic where it thinks it’s revolutionary, only one brown-skinned person in all of England, totally loses momentum when it abandons Evie/Natalie Portman. I blame the Wachowskis.
Carolyn: I didn’t so much mind that, given that the fascist state portrayed might have wiped out multicultural elements in the same way they wiped out homosexuals or anyone with a copy of the Koran.
I thought it was highly entertaining! I agree though that the sets could’ve been more futuristic–but I didn’t mind too much because there was plenty of eye candy. Perhaps the thought was that it might’ve been too much of a distraction…
The graphic novel makes it clear that people of color have been completely wiped out by the time the story begins.
I thought it was really, really, really, really wonderful. In fact, I keep wondering if I cut it too much slack for some reason. But, what the hell, I think it’s okay to be won over by a movie that, in the grand June Carter Cash (unpirated by Reese Witherspoon) tradition, is “just trying to matter.”