V For Vendetta

The best thing I can say about this movie—and I’m not really damning with faint praise—is that it’s head and shoulders above any other adaptation of a graphic novel I’ve ever seen. I have nothing to say about its faithfulness to the source material (the author has disowned the movie) as I have not seen it … indeed, I’ve never managed to finish any graphic novel. They’re not my milieu. But as an independent work of art, it has many things going for it.
The biggest plus is that there are actual ideas here, and villains who don’t need any super powers beyond the heel of a boot and the crunch of a truncheon. Fascists, in other words. Bad guys who are all too real. That would be enough, but it also examines terrorism, which takes some balls in this day and age, when we’re at “war” with it. What’s a terrorist? It means different things depending on who’s got the sticks of dynamite and who’s got the aircraft carriers, cruise missiles, and F-14s. It can even mean different things at different times. If you had asked Menachem Begin, who ordered the bombing of a hotel full of people (the King David) in 1946 as head of the Irgun, he would have described himself as a freedom fighter. Later, he would call identical acts by the Palestinians “terrorism.” Which is morally worse, car bombs or cluster bombs? You decide.
The director doesn’t pull his punches, either. As surely as Adenoid Hynkel in Chaplin’s The Great Dictator is Adolph Hitler, the regime depicted in this movie is the Bush administration. There are many graphic images evoking Abu Ghraib, among many other post-9/11 atrocities done in the name of keeping us safe. The Fearless Leader’s dialogue could have been cribbed from a GWB speech, with its talk of “faith” when it means repression and intolerance. All dissidents and deviants are rounded up and executed, including homosexuals. Police have unlimited powers, and are mostly thugs. Secret abductions, trials, and summary executions are the norm. Can you say “extraordinary rendition?” Can you say “Guantanamo Bay?”
It was also gutsy to use Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot as the central trope of the movie. 400 years later, British children are still burning the man in effigy. Whoa! That’s getting in your face! That’s asking you to ask yourself some hard questions. Is it a good thing to blow up the Old Bailey if there is no justice in it anymore? It is ethical to blow up Parliament if the laws being enacted in there are fascistic? My answer is yes. You decide.
Would it be ethical to blow up the Supreme Court and Congress in 2007? My answer: Not yet, but stick around until 2009 and ask me again. Let’s see who steals the election this time.
Now the downside. It’s too long, and in the end, too cartoonish. (Sorry, graphic novelish.) I don’t have an affinity for characters who have super powers, whether obtained in a lab fire at a sinister government laboratory or by being from Planet Krypton or getting bit by a mutant spider. This is an adolescent boy’s fantasy, even if the super powers are just being superhumanly good at throwing knives and kung foolishness. It undercuts the serious message to have the evils opposed by this man who is able to frustrate the tools of totalitarianism so easily, who appears instantly when he’s needed, who wins all his fights without breaking a sweat. That’s why, in the end, graphic novels are all just comic books.