I liked it but it was not so good as I had hoped for
the mid-part was too slow and dark
I loved it despite the liberties they had taken with the source material, and this is from someone who absolutely adores the graphic novel.
I think they really managed to bring forth a realistic personality for V. My favourite line in the movie is the single word “Never” when the doctor asks if it is meaningless to apologize. It’s perfectly delivered.
I would have liked to see the killing of the bishop, though. That was so cool in the comic.
I stick to what I said in an earlier thread: the graphic novel is fantastic and the movie is not as much so, but still great.
It did a fairly okay job of compressing the source material–cutting out a lot of secondary characters and subplots, for instance, and reworking the material to suit (for instance:
In the graphic novel, Finch’s partner is a good deal more fleshed out; he’s violent and abusive towards his wife Helen, a very brutally mean man, and after he’s killed by V Helen gets worse and worse luck as his widow until she essentially becomes a prostitute. She finally ends up being transformed by her experience–almost the same hardening effect that happens to Evey, in a way–and ends up being the one to shoot the Chancellor in an ambush attack on the street. In the movie, obviously, all this is cut out; Creedy kills Chancellor Sutler before turning the guns on V, and Finch’s partner is a really innocuous, straight-up foil to Finch’s increasing cynicism.
A lot of the moral ambiguity and layering was lost with the removal of these subplots and characters, and some great scenes like the Vicious Cabaret (the second-best scene in the graphic novel–the first is Valerie’s letter); the biggest change was the relationship between V and Evey:
The graphic novel has Evey actually sleeping with Gordon, who’s not gay, and unsure as to whether V is her father or not; the movie makes Gordon gay and amps up the sexual tension between V and Evey.
Essentially, the graphic novel is more nuanced, more subtle, and way more powerful; but the movie has some very sweet moments (V is much more sympathetic, even lovable) and some great cinematography, and as an adaptation… well, it’s not bad. Certainly better than that Godawful League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
Not a bad movie, and a lot of the changes improved the story. For instance there was no compelling reason for Finch to take drugs to get an insight into V’s character. Making Finch an honest, hard working detective was much more effective.
Although I think the ending was weakened, and lost its mythic resonance.
I didn’t actually read the novel until after seeing the movie, but in the end I liked the novel better. That being said I still liked the movie.
One of the main problems I had with the movie were that it was more action oriented than the book was (granted the extra action scenes were neat, they just didn’t fit the character).
Another was:That in the movie the overall message was one about people taking up the job of changing the government for their own good. Where as the message of the book was that people no longer needed government at all and they were capable of being responsible for themselves, makign V an anarchist. He was also portrayed much more morally ambiguous in the book.
Also:The ending would have been much better if the crowd dressed as V was significantly smaller and being watched by non participaters (i.e. people were joining the rebellion, but not the entire nation). Plus I found the scene of them taking off the masks to be a contrived and unnecessary attempt at an emotional ending.
V definitely is an anarchist in the novel, but that doesn’t necessarily make anarchism the message. I saw the story as the juxtaposition of two extremes - fascism and anarchism - and while we’re culturally conditioned to pick V (the underdog, the revolutionary against a totalitarian regime and so forth) to sympathize with, it’s not by any means a clear choice. Both sides have sympathetic and nonsympathetic characteristics.
I think the changes made for the movie benefitted the work overall, particular what someone said earlier about Finch (making him just an honest detective, without attempting to learn about V’s past by taking LSD), and also cutting out the extremely boring sequences with the other government officials. I particularly zoned out during the graphic novel’s parts about the one milquetoast guy who was being controlled by his domineering, Lady Macbeth-esque bitch of a wife (who ended up cheating on him with the Scottish thug hired by Creedy, and so on and so forth). I didn’t miss that stuff at all. I also preferred V’s final method for overthrowing the government in the movie (mailing masks to everyone to ensure anonymity) to his method in the graphic novel, which was never explained well, and seemed to be too much of a deus ex machina (gaining access to the Fate computer in Sutlow/Susan’s own quarters).
What I DID miss were two things: the “Vicious Cabaret” musical montage (which would have been so awesome on film!) and my favorite of all of V’s lines from the graphic novel: “Give me a viking funeral.” So badass, so perfect, and there seemed to be no reason for the filmmakers to leave it out.
I don’t know about you, but I find it more credible that V managed to crack a computer than that he managed to manufacture several hundred thousand identical masks and send them out by mail.[/spoiler]Oh, and I forgot to mention the thing about the ending that did bug the hell out of me:[spoiler]They left out Evey becoming V and taking a new “apprentice”. I loved that “full circle” moment of the graphic novel, from V’s line “you must know the face behind this mask, but you must not know my face” to Evey/V’s final line “This is my home. I call it the Shadow Gallery”.
Speaking as someone who didn’t read the graphic novel and was just interested in seeing a good movie that had a lot of great actors in it…
It was a pretty awful movie.
V’s treatment of Evie after the raid was, frankly, preposterous, and was inexplicable inasmuch as it required V to have a number of accomplices who were not in evidence anywhere else in the film. There was far too much dull police procedural work - and that despite the fact that Stephen Rea was excellent - and the tired, trudging march towards the less-than-shocking realization that the government was behind some of the past terrorist activities was entirely unnecessary; any viewer with a brain knew the truth the instant the subject was raised.
The second and third acts were just appalling. Unfocused and illogical. V as a hero might have worked really well in a comic book; in cinema there was too much cliche there. Ah, the incredibly verbose, cultured. charming hero with a dark past and (more or less unexplained in the movie) martial arts skills, repeating verbose and yet pointless pseudo-philosophy (the influence of the Matrix folks could not possibly be more obvious.)
No, sir, it wasn’t good.
I liked the movie and loved the book. Natalie Portman, an actor I don’t normally care for, really impressed me. I was also glad that they got a big name to play V and still weren’t tempted to give him face-time (or he wasn’t ego-fucked enough to ask for it; either way it was a smart choice that a lot of producers/directors wouldn’t have made.)
One question I’ve got to ask: The title of the thread is “did you like V . . . ?” - Why is everybody using spoiler boxes? If you haven’t seen the movie, this thread isn’t directed at you, so you can’t expect it to be without spoilers.
These are the Matrix folks.
I don’t think he necessarily manufactured them. He’d been planning his attack on the government for decades, but he only became visible as the Guy Fawkes masked vigilante in the final year or so. He could have purchased ordinary Guy Fawkes masks fifteen years ago, and laid them in storage for the final step of his plot.
I liked the comic book ending better, but I don’t think it would have worked in the movie. There’s no way anyone could mistake Natalie Portman for Hugo Weaving, even with the mask and hat. I think it would end up looking farcical.
V didn’t have any accomplices. All the people Evie interacted with were V in disguise. The cops who arrested and black bagged her were real, but at some point, V intercepted the van and hijacked Evie back to the Shadow Gallery. Also, the actions of the government were not supposed to be a surprise to the audience, only to (some of) the characters in the movie.
In defense of the altered relationship between V and Evey, one should consider that in the book, Evey was WAY younger than Natalie Portman… as in “youngish teenager.” Somehow, I think that if she’d been that young in the movie, the idea of introducing romantic tension between she and V would have been kind of offputting.
I didn’t really like the last part that much, it seemed pretty unfocused/uninteresting.
However, the destruction of the Old Bailey to the tune of the 1812 is now one of my favourite movie moments ever, which more than makes up for it.
[spoiler] Then you weren’t paying attention, and the movie put one over on you.
In the movie, the “shocking realization” is utterly, totally wrong. Finch gets fed the information by the “insider”… who turns out to be V in disguise, feeding Finch exactly what Finch wants to hear in order to get Finch to put a watch on Creedy (which leads to Creedy becoming paranoid and willing to take out the PM).
For this “shocking realization” to be true, the Norse Hammer party leaders needed to have put together a cure to the spread disease before it was unleashed. Except that we know from the doctor’s journal that she was trying to figure out a cure by testing the “undesirables.” Which means that the conspiracy timeline is screwed up: they had to be rounding up people to put them in camps for testing so they could create the cure in order to unleash the disease that would allow them to grab the power they needed to begin rounding up people and putting them in camps.
It’s like the conspiracy theories that floated around after 9/11 stating that Bush allowed the attack to happen so that he could invade Afghanistan so his oil buddies could build a pipeline there. Doesn’t matter that there’s no evidence, or that several elements of it directly contradict reality; it has to be true because the people in power benefit in some distant way.
I apologize if I’m going off on a bit of a rant here, but I despise the simplistic Hollywood calculus that whomever benefits from a disaster must be directly responsible for it, because it encourages such mental laziness in the populace. “Bush got more power after 9/11? Then he must be in some way responsible, perhaps by letting it occur in the first place!” “Bush isn’t responsible for 9/11, so he can’t be exploiting it for his own political gains!” And V For Vendetta is the first movie I’ve seen that actually didn’t follow that calculus: the conspiracy theory is revealed as a hoax, and those in power, even though we consider them horrible and evil, didn’t actually perpetrate the disaster; they just exploited it for their ends, which is way fucking more realistic.[/spoiler]
John, I was paying attention to the movie, but I’m not sure you were:
[spoiler]When was it ever clearly indicated that the scientists experimenting on V et al. were searching for a cure to anything? They’re certainly working for the bad guys, but on what?
The conspiracy theory was NEVER revealed as a hoax. It’s certainly true that V has his won reasons for telling Finch what he did, but that doesn’t make it necessarily false, at least not for the most part. Furthermore, there’s substantial circumstantial evidence presented that the government was in fact behind the plagues, even leaving V’s exposition aside.
I’d like to refer directly to the script but can’t find it online.
[/spoiler]
I haven’t seen it. I may some day. This is precisely one of those movie adaptations I’d have to see with someone who’s also read the original source material so we can nitpick the hell out of it while it was going on, thereby annoying the shit out of anyone around us. In fact, I probably shouldn’t have read this thread, since I now now that Gordon is guy, V and Evey have sexual tension and that they changed the ending so that in now involves a bunch of people wearing the Guy Fawkes masks. I’d been doing so well ignoring the previews and trailers, too.
I’ll bow out now.
:: Walks off whistling “This Vicious Carabret” ::
RickJay: I, your ever-helpful love goddess, have the DVD, and…
At Larkhill, in Dr. Staunton-Surridge’s voiceover diary entries, she says specifically–after talking about her “first batch of test subjects”–that: “Nuclear power is meaningless in a world where a virus can kill an entire population and leave its wealth intact.” So there’s direct confirmation that the government at least developed the plagues; and all the further conjecture (Finch’s and V’s) lines up with the circumstancial evidence.
I agree with the sentiments expressed that the ending was too Hollywood.
Concerning the question posed by the title, yes, I did like V for Vendetta.
I say this as a person who hasn’t read the novel and as someone who appreciates a good Governmental dystopia (in fiction, natch). I’m also the slightly paranoid type who views the current ‘terrorism means we should bug your car with GPS’ climate as suspicious, so perhaps I was pre-disposed to like the film regardless of style or presentation.
Plus, blowing up the Houses of Parliament to the 1812 Overture is just fucking cool.
It’s probably the most faithful adaptaton of Alan Moore’s work to date–and evidence that his work should never be adapted to the screen again. Things that work great in a comic book don’t work so well in a movie.