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V for Vendetta (2005)

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From Time Out London

2020: after a devastating viral outbreak has plunged America into civil war, Britain is a repressive fascist state headed by John Hurt’s dictator Adam Sutler. Resistance however, is stirring in the unlikely form of an elusive insurgent known as ‘V’ (Hugo Weaving), whose features hide behind a Guy Fawkes mask. He’s already blown up the Old Bailey, and is promising that Westminster, another emblem of institutionalised injustice, will follow next year. It could be another November 5 to remember, unless Stephen Rea’s dogged state investigator can locate the rebel icon’s secret lair, though the latter may have found an ally in Natalie Portman’s plucky TV researcher, whose bitter past has its telling secrets too.

Alan Moore’s original graphic novel, begun in the early ’80s, reshaped the contours of Orwellian nightmare as an indictment of the Thatcher era, though Moore has disassociated himself from this adaptation by the post-‘Matrix’ Wachowski brothers, who somehow persuaded Warner Bros to bankroll a dystopian anti-Bush onslaught where the bomb-toting good guys cherish the banned Koran and the baddies are the government. Still, audiences may not be rushing from the multiplexes to man the barricades just yet. They’ll have to wake up first, because ideological frissons aside, this is a strikingly soporific debut for the Wachowskis’ former assistant. Tantalising set-up in place, it flounders for the next two hours, desperately piling on exposition and flashback before a truly laughable would-be rabble-rousing finale. Decent performances notwithstanding, this is both visually uninspired (the totalitarian iconography looks like ‘1984’ with LCD screens), and ultimately unpersuasive in its posturing radical chic. For all its anti-establishment esprit, it’s more a case of ‘Z for Zzzz’.

Author: TJ

Time Out London Issue 1856: March 15-22 2006

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User reviews of this film

Iain Stringer said...

Posted on Mar 28 2010 21:25 I enjoyed this movie. I think it depicts a vision of the future- ok in a comic strip way. That's not a crime. That's often a cleverly stylized way of explaining big themes like this. I felt it wasn't all to be taken so literally- more metaphorically. The mask for example- was a way of depicting the propaganda in the movie. That all the leadership/control mechanisms here are false. And I think the reason V wears a mask too is because he got caught up in seeking his revenge- an eye for an eye..... his cause had consumed him. So enjoy the film for its stylized way and may it make us all think twice about what we hear and read from now on in..........

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yduric said...

Posted on Sep 01 2007 01:46 This film is not really bad, the idea of somehow 'modernizing' the 1984 issues is interesting, but clearly underdeveloped and oversimplified. The acting is also decent, but what makes the film finally unsatisfying is first of all an incredible mess, as if the director had wanted to make a 'cocktail' , or a 'multiple ripoff' of all the most famous films of the genre. This gives a terrible impression of 'déjà-vu'. What ultimately sinks the film is its huge pretentiousness, which results in a film that you would literally want to 'compress' to a minimum size, as you do it with video codecs, but in this case, compression would have definitely provided a better quality.

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