V For Vendetta (2006)

I was prepared to enjoy V for Vendetta...I wasn't prepared to be moved by it.

V is, of course, the film version of Alan Moore and David Lloyd's seminal graphic novel, created in England in the Margaret Thatcher/Ronald Reagan era of the 1980s. (For more about Alan Moore, click here.) You won't find Moore's name on this film, though. It's credited as "Based on the graphic novel drawn by David Lloyd and published by Vertigo/DC Comics." I'm not even going to comment on this, because as a movie, this work stands alone.

Unlike other big-screen adaptations of Moore's work (including From Hell and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen), V remains relatively faithful to its source material. But V means more now then it did when it was first published. It's a cautionary tale of a world not to far down the road, providing the wrong turns are taken, some of which have already occured. There are veiled references to the U.S. war that went wrong, coupled with scenes of the war in Iraq. While not to take anything away from either Moore or Lloyd, this work is more powerful, more moving and much more important as a film than it ever was as a graphic novel.

V is about a totalitarian government ruling England after a series of disasters, including terrorist attacks, rampant disease and water poisoning. Over 100,000 people die and the government--which orchestrated the disasters in the first place--places the country under a form of martial law, with imposed curfews, secret police (the fingermen), state-run television broadcasts and more. Into this world comes V, a fugitive from a government internment camp and research facility. He is one of the few survivors of Lark Hill, and it's 20 years after he and many others were sent there and experimented on.

The government has outlawed anything they view as an aberration: Books, music, and movies on a cultural level, but on a more heinous level, freedom of speech, religion and sexual preference. And into all this comes V, a scarred man with his own vendetta, not just a freedom fighter. While fighting his own war against the oppressive government, V also enacts his own campaign for vengeance against those who created him, and in the process creates his own freedom fighter in Evie Hammond (Natalie Portman).

It is especially telling that I saw this film today, on the 3-year anniversary of the Iraq war. As I write this the lower third news crawl on my TV screen tells me that the former Iraqi prime minister says the country is in a state of civil war. Vice President Dick Cheney disagrees. He says the terrorists "have reached a stage of desperation." When are terrorists ever NOT in a stage of desperation? Desperate times call for desperate actions and that is a central theme of V. While there is the oft-quoted line, "People should not fear their governments...governments should fear their people," there is a line more telling, more chilling, spoken around the same time. I'm paraphrasing, but it's something like "the destruction of a building can change the world." We found that out on Sept. 11, 2001.

V works as both an action thriller and a slightly sci-fi look at the future, a future not so different from the world we live in now, which makes it all the scarier. There are a number of moments in V that I found moving, but none moreso than near the end when the people take to the streets to protest a government gone bad, a government filled with deceit, lies and personal gain. They rise up as one man, as one face, but they take off that face to reveal their true selves, as a nation of people who won't be lied to anymore. That scene may seem trite and pat to many people. To me, it was moving and left me with a feeling I never got from any comic book. V For Vendetta is bigger than Natalie Portman or Joel Silver or the Wachowski Brothers or even Alan Moore. As an idea, as a warning, as a cautionary tale, it eclipses its roots and creation and forces us to think about the world we live in today, and how we're just a few wrong turns from the world we live in tomorrow.