V for It could have been a lot worse, really
(Oh, isn’t that such a clever title…?) Following Peter Bradshaw’s one-star review, I could have lived without seeing V for Vendetta, but by the time his review appeared it was too late — I’d already booked, after a rather lengthy battle with the Showcase’s phone system, which seems to use patented voice non-recognition software. The trip was made more fraught after my original cinema-going partner pulled out and I had to bribe Rebecca to see what she termed “a boy’s film”. Expectations for the night were therefore set very low, but in the end that probably helped, as we came away thinking the film was rather better than we were prepared for.
(Spoiler alert — in the unlikely event you’re going to see this film you probably don’t want to continue reading…)
On the whole it is pretty faithful to the comic book, and where changes are made I’d say they are generally improvements. But I felt the telling is somewhat rushed, and the whole suffers as a result. The back-story — which explains what kind of country the events are set in — is left very late. This means that in early scenes in which the lead character perpetrates various terrorist acts it is not entirely clear that these are things with which the audience should (presumably) sympathise. Similarly, the murders of the various senior party figures lose the theatre and drama they carried in the original.
But perhaps the most significant problem is a political plot point. The film’s fascist government is portrayed as doing all the things you’d expect storybook fascists to to do: lie to its people, kill gays, Muslims, Jews, and non-whites, conduct experiments on prisoners, hide their bodies in mass graves, and much much more. But as the story unfolds it transpires the people behind the government are also guilty of engineering the biological attack many years previously which propelled the government into power. It’s as if the film makers thought that merely running a racist police state wouldn’t be sufficient to convince an audience of the need to bring it down — only if they were also the brains behind an evil pharmaceutical company would anti-government acts be justified.
It’s this moral decision which I’m most uncomfortable about. I’m not sure if it speaks ill of the film makers, or if they’re just being honest about their target audience. Peter Bradshaw’s criticisms are largely that the film lazily stereotypes Britain and a 1980s view of a dictatorial future. This is true enough and if it is quickly forgotten that may well be why. But if you can stand that then it’s not a terrible watch. Meanwhile, though, I continue to worry that racism and government surveillance are no longer considered inherently wrong.
