Let’s face it, the US and UK (slowly becoming more and more interchangeable by only one letter) are in a serious mess right now. Both countries have mentally unbalanced religious fundamentalist power junkies in charge who are merely a figurehead for vast faceless government-policy-controlling corporations. Bush is too stupid to realize he is doing a terrible job and walks around grinning like a global village idiot; Blair is an arrogant, messiah complex-ecstatically-suffering corrupt money-grubber seemingly unwilling to relinquish power until it is pried from his cold dead political hands. Emotionally and mentally fried populaces still shadowbox the popping-up-everywhere-but-nowhere specter of international ‘terrorism’ but are growing tired and cynical and despondent, as bodies of all ages and nationalities mount up in the interminable war-swamp of Iraq. In Scotland, home of this website, the shoddily-constructed, ten-times-over-budget Scottish Parliament falls in around the ears of the country’s ineffectual MSPs, and the two-chins one-note zero-talent First Minister Joke McConnell is a man of no intellect or vision, a jumped-up local councilor who harbors ludicrously delusional visions of a career on the world political stage.

Like I said, it’s a serious mess.

Into this frantic political fray steps ‘V For Vendetta,’ a gleefully anarchic work of pop-agitprop with a lot – maybe too much – on its mind. Adopted from a comic book by Alan Moore (who removed his name from the final product, but he’s notoriously mercurial and this is not the first time he has done this with an adaptation of his work) and David Lloyd written during Fuhrer Margaret Thatcher’s 11-year reich-reign of British society-destroying and greed-encouraging terror during the 80s, ‘V’ holds up a mirror to those despondent right-wing times with a few contemporary riffs thrown in to remind us the more things change, the more they stay the same, and to reflect contemporary world-mind malaise and anxiety and confusion and anger.

The world this film presents us with is a grim – and not at all unfamiliar, if heavily exaggerated – one. Britain is under the jackboot of the High Chancellor (John Hurt, in a somewhat cartoonish perpetually ranting performance), a fascistic slug whose evil government controls the populace through intimidation (fear of incarceration or of terrorism or of being ‘different’ and suffering the consequences) and spin-doctors and curfews and spies and totalitarian terror in general. Evey (Natalie Portman, in faltering-English-accent performance) works for the British Television Network, a state-sanctioned mind-control/entertainment organization. She accidentally gets involved with Guy Fawkes mask-wearing anachronistic anarcho-freedom-fighter V (Elf King Hugo Weaving) and her life is changed immeasurably for the better. V has an agenda, and it’s a simple one: “People shouldn’t fear their governments. Governments should fear their people.”

This eloquent, Shakespeare-quoting man is sick and tired of living in an illusory world of lies and hatred and manipulation and sets out to remind people that they are the government and of what they have lost by blowing up symbols of British justice now utterly corrupted, like the Old Bailey (in a hilarious, inspiring sequence of the building blowing up to classical music and fireworks) in London. But how did he come to be the man he is, and why is he doing what he is? Is he a freedom fighter, a terrorist (semantics-talk for the exact same thing, depending on who wants you to believe what about whom), a deranged lunatic…or maybe all three? As we dig deeper into his past we mostly find out the answers to these questions, and our perceptions about him are rendered more complex because of what we find out as agenda becomes more personal and vengeful.

Now. As I said, ‘V’ depressingly reflects some of what is going on in the world right now, where a throwaway scene from a popular television program with a maniacally laughing turban-wearing Arab menacing a screaming tied-up white woman with dynamite can speak volumes about popular culture and current culture-clash and mind-control mindsets. The world ‘V’ presents is very white, very controlled…and very scared. In a cheap, simplistic, vindictive blow, we find out the US has been destroyed. All ethnic and sexual minorities have been removed from the quasi-futuristic UK presented here, in scenes and plot points reminiscent of Nazi Germany and the mass graves of the Holocaust, and the film is deeply, deeply cynical about everything except for the need to stand up to dictators in whatever form they come, whether they appear to be dictators or not. Which is, of course, a message worth remembering.

The Wachowski brothers, who did the ‘Matrix’ films, wrote the screenplay for this film, and mostly – though not entirely – keep it free of the pseudo-philosophical babbling and wirework battling from those movies. The viewer is left disoriented and depressed as a rogue’s gallery of recent atrocity images like the London bombings of last year, or Abu Ghraib and that prison’s tortured prisoner orange jumpsuits parade across the screen. These familiar images bring their distressed emotional real-life response baggage with them, and the mood of the film is thus rendered much more grim and weighty, making it seem deeper than it actually is. Because, as intelligent and interesting a film as this is, it’s not nearly as smart as it thinks it is and there are plot holes you could fly a hijacked plane through.

We never truly find out 100% about how V came to be who he is and how he came to finance some of the things he buys in the film, like thousands of replicas of his mask (wherever they came from) that are used at a pivotal moment of the climax. He actually comes off more as a superhero than a ‘real’ human being, and we never find out how he learned the kung fu or complex swordplay (except seeing him watch an old movie on this count – hardly realistic) skills he uses during the running time. Evey wanders round London with a fake ID unmolested, even though she is wanted by the police who seemingly have supernatural surveillance abilities during other moments of the film. And there are other plot and character incongruities, enough of them to really take the edge off the film. I don’t know how much of this stuff is due to the comic book and how much to the Wachowskis’ screenplay, because I never read the printed version, but some things just simply seem to get lost in translation somewhere.

However. All problems aside, this is definitely a film worth seeing. The grim grimy gritty almost colorless cinematography presents us with a believable world devoid of color or hope or light or life, and the overall tone, of a country (and by extension the western world) kept controlled and frightened (surveillance vans roam the streets doing random communication sweeps) by its own hateful hurtful government is a very timely and truthful one. Cliché Guevara some of it may well be, but it’s good to see a film with at least a semblance of a brain in its head and with some extremely powerful haunting moments to elevate it above the also-rans. And it’s rattled the cages of loads of right-wing fundamentalist nuts in the US, who have crowded the film’s www.imdb.com message board whining on about it being ‘liberal propaganda’ and whatnot, completely forgetting the film is not about America, it’s about Great Britain, except by extension of certain ideas in it. What more do you want (unless of course you’re one of the aforementioned lockstep mindset idiots) from a big-budget piece of entertainment? It certainly beats ‘The Dukes of Hazzard’ anyway…

Graham Rae is a Scottish scribbler from the cheery charming picture-postcard-perfect post-industrial up-and-coming internationally renowned tourist destination of Falkirk, now resident in the US. He has been writing for as long as he can remember (started at any early age, carving graffiti into womb walls) and am halfway through my first novel (well, third, but the other mishmash misfires don’t count),’ Weekend Warriors.’ He has been writing about film for various electronic and print publications for 18 years now, and you can see a sporadically entertaining eclectic selection of his ramble/rantings at www.filmthreat.com

© 2006 Laura Hird All rights reserved.