My review, since the boards won't let me post a new thread yet....and that only because I left my old account behind.
So onwards.
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V for Vendetta
Some critics have been panning V for Vendetta for a whole host of problems, accusing it of a range of things from lack of cinematic skill and coherence to a "vacuous" script.
I always wonder, when critics pull out their knives, if they are simply reacting in dissapointment to absurdly high expectations. With a movie like Vendetta, I could easily see that this was the case: it is, after all, the latest movie written by The Wachowski Brothers of (also-controversial) Matrix fame.
Let's start with what VFV is NOT. It is NOT a masterpiece; it will not change American cinema in the same way The Matrix did. It is NOT a popcorn movie, bristling with special effects (a la The Matrix trilogy). It is NOT a comic-book movie in the vein of Spidermans 1-3, Batman Begins, X1-3, The Incredible HUlk, or Elektra. It is NOT a quick cash-in on a comic book with a cult following: if it was, it surely would have spent more of its running time on martial arts, gun battles and explosions, and less time on exposition, plot, drama, and character development.
Finally, VFV is NOT an easy movie to forget, or an easy movie to wrap your head around.
It *is* a thoroughly enjoyable film, unique in its thoughtfulness, honesty and emotionally resilience. It *is* well-written and mostly true to the source material, although comic book purists may try to crucify it for key departures from Alan Moore's original graphic novel.
I want to spend time addressing the movie from a few different angles: first, as an adaptation of Alan Moore and David Lloyd's original work (because the comparisons are inevitable). Second, as a movie in its own right. Third, I want to touch briefly on the personalities behind the movie: the Wachowskis and Alan Moore, and their respective handling of the film. Finally, I want to examine what a few critics have said about the film so far, and explain why I, for the most part, disagree with their nitpicking.
By now, you have probably heard that the original graphic novel that serves as the source material to this film was spawned from Thatcherite Great Britian in the 80s. It was also projected forward to an alternate-history 1997. The screenplay has been updated to resonate with modern times, and projected slightly forward to 2020, with subtle and not-so-subtle references to global pandemics and biological weapons (bird flu anyone?), corporate, government and religious corruption, and American imperialism. In this sense, the source material has been updated in a way that makes sense, given that it is designed to resonate with a modern audience (although some themes, such as the repression of gays, were held over from the original novel and amplified by the recent life-imitates-art legislation against gay marriage).
VFV is not a perfect adaptation of the source material; but it is damn close to it, and the source material gets better treatment than any other comic book I've ever seen, Alan Moore's charicteristic villification of the film notwithstanding. Where the Wachowski's deviated in major ways in the plot (V declaring his love for Evey, whole characters dissapearing or changing sexual identity, a slightly ridiculous mass-mailing program that renders an army of V's at the film's climax), they managed to capture the essence of the graphic novel, most appropriately with respect to the titular character V.
The movie suffers from an audience's poor attention span - but to be fair, were it to be a direct scene-by-scene translation of the book, with all the necessary additional storylines and subplots that render the story on paper so tight and compelling, it would probably be a 20-hour film. The necessity of cutting out all the extra leaves the viewer with only the vaugest inkling of the source of V's power (which is explained in great detail in the book), a misunderstanding of Evey's past (also explained), the importance of the relationship between Evey and Stephen Rhea's character, and Evey's importance to V (both crucial to the respective character arcs).
As a movie standing on its own, VFV is - let me just be clear on this - damn queer. Only from a comic book could you get a the idea of a bloody Fawkesian antihero with an obsession for the letter V and a penchant for spouting Shakespeare. Furthermore, the fact that Warner Bros was brave enough to produce a movie that features the violent destruction of not one, but two political landmarks of the modern world is enough to set this movie apart. The fact that the titular character is clearly a deranged (if brilliant) terrorist/provocateur who kills without mercy or remorse is an even longer shot. Add in the juxtaposition of a movie about a neofascist UK with the movie's promotional posters, which feature a WWII-era American propoganda-ish theme, and the whole situation gets even more wierd.
Whether it is a wierd that works will be entirely up to the viewer and, I suspect, most primarily the viewer's political leanings. The film asks big questions - unfortunately for impatience moviegoers, mostly via lengthy exposition - about the nature of freedom and responsibility, meaning and madness, justice and revenge, the proper relationships between the government and the governed, the line between genius and madness, and the distinction between Good and Evil. For people open to pondering these questions, the movie will provide some food for thought and, at best, a moment (perhaps many moments) of reflection on our current society - but for those who would rather not be critical of the world around them (easy to spot by their dogmatic insistence that this movie *is not intelligently critical of the world around them*) - the Blue Pill is definitely the best choice.
If you can get passed the strangeness of the film, you're in for a good time. The major character-development and expository middle is bookended by luscious action sequences, and the performances are solid across the board - particularly in the case of V, whose veering between genius and madness is brilliantly delivered through Hugo Weaving's expressive gestures and body language. Ms. Portman gets down on her knees and sobs uncontrollably, showing more emotion than I thought she was capable of - and bringing a crucial emotional intensity and rawness to the film. She is the Yang to V's necessarily inexpressive Yin. Although her sobbing is almost preferable to her unpredictably wavering accent (why wasn't Kiera Knightly put in this role?).
The cinematography is overwhelmingly satisfactory, with a rich use of light and shadow on V's mask that actually seem to change his expression at key moments (as when a creeping shadow highlights an eyebrow, suggesting its elevation). Without being an expert in the field, it certainly appears that the cinematographers did everything they could with what they had to work with, to good effect.
The film is not without flaws. Admittedly, some of the blatantly political messages in the film - including a Nazi symbol superimposed over a "Coalition of the Willing" poster in a closeted gay man's basement - are so partisan as to be ludicrous. But that symbol in particular didn't exist in Moore's original work (perhaps one of the reasons he called the screenplay "imbecilic"), and is an add-in by the ridiculously politicized Hollywood. The film is weaker for its occassional blatant playing to the radical left's point of view.
Apart from these major missteps, this film, more than any other I've seen recently, is open to interpretation - is V a sympathetic character, to be pitied? Was Evey's character change forced through indoctrination and brainwashing, or did his harsh treatment truly set her free? Midway through the film, V says "An artist is someone who lies in order to tell the truth." We are left wondering - were his "artist's lies" justified in attaining his goal? Are the filmmakers'?
Speaking of the filmmakers, much has been made about a few key people behind the film - Alan Moore, for one, who has dissasociated himself with the work, calling it nasty names at every opportunity. A folower of film culture or Alan Moore will know, however, that this is not unusual. No doubt Mr. Moore would be much less popular as a comic book author if he cozied up to the Big Bad Evil Institutional Hollywood.
On the other hand, I can understand a bitter dissapointment at seeing your own concepts less-than-fully-realized on the big screen - but if that were the case, I'd think Moore should still be making a bigger stink about League of Extraordinary Gentleman than V for Vendetta. It's important to realize - and one only realizes this after reading V for Vendetta, the book, as penned by Moore, as well as LoEG, Swamp Thing and Miracleman - that Moore is an excellent writer, better than the Wachowskis, and any of his material will suffer under the pen of a less-accomplished craftsman. Why he doesn't already understand this and take it in stride is beyond me.
The other bit of gossip is the idea that Larry and Andy Wachowski, responsible for the screenplay, actually ghost-directed the picture while putting James McTeigue (who worked with them on all three Matrix movies) symbolically at the helm to keep them out of the limelight. Whether or not this is true - and this reviewer finds the idea highly unlikely - James McTeigue did a fine job on a very challenging film, given that it was his first time in the director's seat.
Some critics disagree. Naturally. That is, after all, their job - to disagree when everyone else is agreeing. That, in fact, is precisely the feeling I get reading the comments of various naysayers about this movie - that they dislike it and/or are panning it for one of two reasons:
1) They don't like the politics in the film and are trying to find excuses to pan it without coming out in support of the Bush administration - because they know that position is untenable (recognizable by their absolute insistence that their reasons for disliking the film are not because of politics)
2) They are one of these curmudgeonly miscreants who hate the things that everybody else likes, and therefore, must stand in opposition to everything that is "popular", because "popular" is somehow "lowbrow" and they must make themselves feel superior out of a inherent insecurity.
These are complex diagnoses, I realize, for film critics who happen to write a nasty review of a truly unusual film. To be fair, I admit the possibility that someo people simply don't like the film, for whatever reason. I can accept that - tastes differ, especially in films, and I have no need or desire to pan those who pan the movie.
On the other hand, I do appreciate it when people can articulate the reasons behind their dislike of a certain movie - and few of these aforementioned critics do a very capable job of that. Most of them throw up vague reasoning related to the editing, blocking, the film's failure to fit into what their "ideal film" should be like, the failure of the film to live up to their expectations, the failure of the film to properly "pace" and lead them from a low to a high (strangely as though the film were responsible for giving them an orgasm), or the failure of the film to adhere slavishly to its source material.
All of these sort of vague, hand-wavey complaints fail to hit home with me, because I strongly sense that they are ingenue screens thrown up to mask a more deep-rooted disagreement with the film's politics, messages, or themes. Some people have gone so far as to deny that the film even HAS politics - as though the film were running for president - and then gone on to complain that they film didn't have a clear enough message, didn't answer the questions it raised, etc. Ohers staunchly insist that the film is TOO clear-cut and tries to impose its message on the viewers. The fact that these contradictory claims exist (oftentimes issuing from the mouth of the same speaker in different breaths) demonstrates a real frenzied hunt for the "proper" criticism that will stick.
This absurd complaint that the film doesn't have a strong enough message reveals the speaker's own lack of grasp of the film's subtlety - or perhaps, worse, their discomfort with and dislike of subtlety. That frightens me, because if they are unable or unwilling to deal with a film that presents and conveys messages and themes with subtlety, perhaps it is because they are too accustomed to a steady diet of propogandistic messages already. This theory, however paranoid, would certainly fit with the aforementioned fear that those who most strongly dislike this movie are those who support (and are accustomed to swallowing the propoganda from) the current neo-conservative US administration.
A lot of critics run into trouble by analyzing the movie as though it were strictly a literalistic narrative, when in fact it is a heavily symbolic allegory. They evaluate it as if it were a Syriana when in fact it is more like one of Aesop's Fables. And like any good fable, when things are ambiguous or seem to lack explanation, one really needs to go back to the original text - in this case, the original graphic novel which, by the way, most naysayers of the movie characteristically refuse to read, stating stuffily that the film should be able to stand on it's own, as though the righteous purity of their dissaproval of the movie might be tainted if they happened to read the book and like it. Needless to say, this sort of closemindedness is not only frustrating, it further betrays critics' alternative agenda - they are looking not for what they can gain or share with others, but for how they can most convingly oppose.
In the final analysis, however, no amount or number of naysaying critics, conservative or liberal, can numb the poison of V for Vendetta's cautionary tale. More than action, more than romance, V for Vendetta is a movie about ideas, and ideas are bulletproof.
Last edited by Sullivan; 03-20-06 at 04:33 PM.