Hello, moviegoers! I am here to talk about a very current film. A film that is current despite the fact it got released more than a decade ago. I watched it last November 5th, because such date has a special meaning in the movie.
"Remember, remember, the Fifth of November, gunpowder, treason and plot!"
V for Vendetta is a dystopian film set in the close future, in which the UK has been overtaken by a fascist political party. The evil government which runs the country uses an elaborate propaganda machine, ruthl¤ess secret policemen, fear and decepit to keep disidents quiet and the truth out of the streets. Only a small group of individuals dares defy the status quo, of which V, a mysterious man who looks like the villian of some cheap operetta, is the most dangerous.
What does V for Vendetta actually offer to us?
The core of the film is V himself. V is an ambiguous hero who could have been ripped out from some Byronic work. He is clever, sophisticate, methodic, and is fueled by pure hate for what the bad guys did to him. Payback is a bitch, and V intends to pay it all. What I like of this character is that it is quite clear that he is a monster himself.
<< "What they did to me was monstruous!"
"And they created a monster." >>>
V's master plan consists in bombing the Brittish Parliament on November 5th, just as Guy Fawks planned centuries ago. The fascists will do anything they can to stop him, of course, and you may expect many to die in the ensuing conflict. It is ok, because most of them are bad as heck. The chief of the secret police is actually as bad as discovering you have no beer in the fridge, if not worse, and John Hurt does a nice job as UK's supreme leader, comming across as an arrogant bastard who reminds me so fuckign much of P‚rez Rubalcaba, a Spanish failed presidential candidate. It is kind of disturbing, actually.
What I find amusing in this film is that it is conspiracy theory fuel. V causes all sort of misschief while pursuing his goal. Meanwhile, the media, controlled by the government, tries to cover up the government's mistakes. When V bombs a building, the media selects a comittee of "experts" that testify the building was about to collapse and the TV announces the bombing was a planned demolition instead of a terrorist strike. There is also a subplot regarding bioweapon research and corruption in the pharma industry, which will remind a lot of people of a coronasomething pandemic of the 21st Century. The Internet is controlled, and people with impopular opinions is discredited or "disappeared".
V's main antagonist is Flinch, a cop who is trying to get him before the UK is plunged into chaos. He is a loyalist to the Party but, in trying to catch V, starts discovering the skeletons the government keeps in its closet. This character works because he comes across as a professional guy who tries to do his best, despite the fact his fellow law enforcers are not cooperative and that, eventually, the fascist government is proven every bit as terroristic as V himself.
Natalie Portmant stars as Eve Hammond, an employee of the fascist TV network who finds herself involved in the terrorist plot against her will. The film tells the story mainly from her point of view. I personally found the character a bit bland, but maybe it was only because she had to share screen with other characters which were hard to beat.
The film does not pull punches. People gets tortured by both sides. Dissidents get beaten into a pulp in front of their kids and made to disappear in black bags. People gets killed for posessing the wrong religious text at home. V for Vendetta is notorious for a segment in which a lesbian prisoner leaves her autobiography, written on toilet paper, which sticks out a bit as a forced aesop ("Gays are people too, so don't send them to concentration camps and inject experimental stuff in them").
A central theme of the film is that people may be stripped out of everything they have, to the point they believe life is the last thing they have left... only to discover that, besides life, they still have principles, and it is better to die than to have those principles taken away.
<<"They offered you a choice between the death of your principles and the death of your body. You said you'd rather die. You faced the fear of your own death and you were calm and still." >>
Sometimes, those principles make you put on a mask, a cape and a hat, throw Shakespearean quotes to the wind while battling gun totting cops with swords and knives, and blow Parliaments up. But hey, if you are going to be a revenegful maniac, why not be a revengeful maniac with style?
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