Now that I've had a day to digest and consider V for Vendetta, I'm ready to share my thoughts. When I walked out of the theater, I thought it was a fantastic movie, but I wanted to make sure that was still true after spending some time thinking about it. So after a day of reflection, here's what I've come up with:1. When I left the theater, I was ready to turn around and go back in, and a day later, I'd still go see it again. It's one of those movies that bears watching a second and even a third time, because there's so much going on.
2. It was heavy-handed, and some of the imagery was overdone, but despite being set in a futuristic London, it was still a pretty biting commentary on today's political situation in the US, touching on the war in Iraq and a media-created "culture of fear", used to chilling effect by the movie's fascist British government. All the more impressive considering Alan Moore wrote this story in the 80's (although the screenplay updated some references to make it more current). It made for an interesting experience, because it's not often that an action movie tries to cause you to reconsider what you believe. The last movie to do that was The Matrix, so it's not surprising that the Wachowski Brothers, who directed The Matrix, were screenwriters on Vendetta. Of course, any time filmmakers allow politics to creep into their work, it's going to polarize critics. One review I read passed the movie's message off as a pose, calling it "rage against the machine, by the machine". But I prefer to think of it as sending an anti-machine message from inside the machine. The creators aren't necessarily part of the machine, rather they're using it as a tool to reach as broad an audience as possible.
3. Natalie Portman's fake English accent bothered me. But only for the first 15 minutes. And she's still gorgeous with a shaved head.
4. Hugo Weaving did a pretty good job creating a relatable character out of a mask that can't show expression, although his dialogue was a bit hard to understand at the beginning of the film. But at the end of the movie, V remains somewhat of a mystery, and I really appreciated that. I think knowing too much about him would have been an easy trap to fall into, and would have made the movie a little too predictable for my taste.
5. I'll buy the DVD. And I'm going to have to read the graphic novel.
1 comment:
It's not my genre, but it does look like a really good movie and I do want to see this. Natalie is a dichotomy to me---she's exceptionally good and beautiful, and then she'll do something on screen that kills it for me (I hate the way she kisses, for instance. I know. It's weird. But in both Garden State and in Closer I noticed it and hated how she was so awkward.) I'm sure the accent will be the same thing.
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