V for Vendetta (2006)

Starring Hugo Weaving and Natalie Portman

V for Vendetta is a dark, violent comic book/movie. It takes place in a depressing vision of a future Britain which resembles what it might have been like had Hitler conquered England. Onto this dark canvas comes a hero/anti-hero, wearing a colorful mask of the British anti-hero Guy Fawkes and a black cape, and wielding swords and knives with dispatch. It’s like Phantom of the Opera/The Three Musketeers versus the Third Reich.

This movie is based on the highly-praised comic work by Alan Brooks. Like many movies spawned from comics (Spiderman, Superman, X-Men, et al), it follows a certain set of rules. The rules include the suspension of the laws of physics, the elevation of sensation over thinking or plot logic, and the demonizing/emphasizing of the bad guys so that the victory of the good guys is that much more heroic.

There’s a serious subtext in this movie. It speaks to how totalitarianism grows, and what it become once it is victorious. Basically, the victory of evil is also ironically its defeat; the seeds of its downfall are sown by the methods used to grab power. (Just like in the U.S. Congress; when one party wins power, it becomes corrupt and thinks it’s invincible, until its hubris leads to its downfall.)

Hugo Weaving is great as the mask-wearing and tortured soul “V”. Natalie Portman is fabulous as the scarred girl/woman who comes to understand who (and what) V is. The arc of the story takes us to dark and violent places; this is not a movie for those who find on-screen violence offensive. Knives and swords draw blood; while symbolically they may be instruments for peace and good in this movie, they also wreak havoc amongst the evil guys. Fortunately the violence has a comic-book quality; while many people get killed, only a few get hurt, and those are the baddies who really deserve it.

I enjoyed this movie. It is dark, but it has interesting ideas. Those interested in drawing analogies will notice that the evil dictatorship of the movie grabbed power by lying, playing to people’s fears, and offering to solve all their problems for them so that they no longer have to think for themselves.

Those who find it difficult to witness the depiction of killing, torture, and suppression of free thought should avoid this movie. It’s not a pretty picture; it is also a great pity that we live in a real world in which such actions are debated and discussed on our TV news and in our culture as part of our national choices on how we react to the problems in our world.