Stayed in a Hotel down in Rochester last night that, amazingly in this day and age, didn’t have any internet access at all. Suffering with Wifi cold turkey, I decided to head to the pictures to see one of those movies that I can’t inflict on Jen on the offchance that it’s uber violent. V for Vendetta has had good reviews so I headed over to Bluewater (thank god for Satnav) and managed to get in.
V for Vendetta is set in a possible England, where the planet is in disarray; USA has fallen in to chaos following successive wars, and Britain is under the control of a dictatorial government led by Adam Sutler (John Hurt), whose police state, curfew and control of the media keep the population in check. On November 5th, the anniversary of the Gunpowder plot, a terrorist known only as V (Hugo Weaving), wearing a Guy Fawkes mask, commits an act of terrorism which causes unrest in the population, and drags innocent bystander Evie Hammond (Portman) in to a plot to give the country back to the people.
Produced by The Watchowski Brothers (Matrix Trilogy) and Directed by James McTeigue (Debut as director), the movie is not at all what I expected. I expected an action movie, but in fact this is not at all what you get. V for Vendetta is a mix of mystery and political satire, told through the eyes of two characters. Detective Finch (Stephen Rea) finds that in his pursuit of V and Evie he uncovers a train of evidence that leads to startling revelations of the basis of society, whilst Evie’s view of terrorism as evil is put to the test by V’s view of what is right and how the right thing can be done using violence.
The end result is a thoughtful movie that gets you thinking about society and terrorism in today’s context. Although the government in the movie uses extreme measures to manipulate society, it seems to me that we are only talking degrees. not differen practices. What this movie did for me was to look at terrorism from the other side. It reminded me that the government is a social construct, in which case a terrorist must also be a social construct. In this case who is good and who is evil is a point of view - I don’t think that many people set out to be evil, they all believe that their cause is the right, and good one, although they are obviously conflicting with each other.
But don’t think that this movie is all thinking and no doing. There’s some cool action in it, when V takes on the bad guys, but it’s a million miles away from the hyperreal action of The Matrix trilogy. It’s also quite disturbing in places, with respect to the actions of the government, and some of the imagery that certainly points to historical events that our race should be ashamed of. So what you get is a very engaging movie that for me, stayed in my thoughts after I left the cinema. Now it may be that this movie resonated with me more because of the setting and the times that we live in.
