V for Vandetta
Mar. 17th, 2006 08:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jcfialaWow.
So, last night on a lark, my wife and I went to go see V for Vandetta, which was showing on Thursday night at a number of theaters at 10. The showing was surprisingly light in people - I'm guessing they didn't advertise the early showings very much.
But: Wow.
It's an astonishing adaptation. Considering how badly Alan Moore's work has been adapted in the past, this movie keeps astonishingly close to the original storyline, only making a few changes to both fit it in the time alloted (132 minutes according to imdb) and to adapt the different format. Comic books invite words, and Alan Moore responded to that adapatation willingly, filling many comic panels with either long dialog or descriptive text to go with the pictures - something that with a less-talented author would have fallen flat. A movie is a more visual medium, and so the radio broadcasts in the original become television, and instead of sharing books the two protagonists share a movie. (Although the word 'protagonist' is loosely applied to V, in my opinion, in both the original work and here.)
V is not much softened by his trip to video-land. Some reviews written by people who've seen the original decry the love story, which had me expecting... well, far more than what is delivered on the screen. In the original work the relationship between the two is explicitly father-daughter: Evey is all of sixteen, and is obviously much lost with her father missing. Evey.film, on the other hand, is more independant - not free, but without her urgent clutching at V for a father-figure, the growth of feeling for her from V does make some sense. She is, after all, quite possibly the first person to spend time with him and not treat him as a monster in quite a long time. That said, he is not any more forgiving to the oppressors of his government, and there is no change to his fate.
At the end of it all, the message is the same. Governments rule only as long as their people submit to that rule, and if enough people are tired of that government, it can and will fall through sheer unity. Or as V says in the movie and the trailer: "People shouldn't be afraid of their Governments. Governments should be afraid of their People."
To put it shortly, I highly recommend this film.
So, last night on a lark, my wife and I went to go see V for Vandetta, which was showing on Thursday night at a number of theaters at 10. The showing was surprisingly light in people - I'm guessing they didn't advertise the early showings very much.
But: Wow.
It's an astonishing adaptation. Considering how badly Alan Moore's work has been adapted in the past, this movie keeps astonishingly close to the original storyline, only making a few changes to both fit it in the time alloted (132 minutes according to imdb) and to adapt the different format. Comic books invite words, and Alan Moore responded to that adapatation willingly, filling many comic panels with either long dialog or descriptive text to go with the pictures - something that with a less-talented author would have fallen flat. A movie is a more visual medium, and so the radio broadcasts in the original become television, and instead of sharing books the two protagonists share a movie. (Although the word 'protagonist' is loosely applied to V, in my opinion, in both the original work and here.)
V is not much softened by his trip to video-land. Some reviews written by people who've seen the original decry the love story, which had me expecting... well, far more than what is delivered on the screen. In the original work the relationship between the two is explicitly father-daughter: Evey is all of sixteen, and is obviously much lost with her father missing. Evey.film, on the other hand, is more independant - not free, but without her urgent clutching at V for a father-figure, the growth of feeling for her from V does make some sense. She is, after all, quite possibly the first person to spend time with him and not treat him as a monster in quite a long time. That said, he is not any more forgiving to the oppressors of his government, and there is no change to his fate.
At the end of it all, the message is the same. Governments rule only as long as their people submit to that rule, and if enough people are tired of that government, it can and will fall through sheer unity. Or as V says in the movie and the trailer: "People shouldn't be afraid of their Governments. Governments should be afraid of their People."
To put it shortly, I highly recommend this film.
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no subject
Date: 2006-03-17 06:11 pm (UTC)I see the relationship in the comic as more complex -- father-daughter aspects, certainly, but also mentor-pupil, lovers, and companions.
I could say more, but it would blend into (GN) spoiler territory.
Looking forward to the film, but I'll have to wait until next week to see it.
CU
no subject
Date: 2006-03-19 06:16 am (UTC)My goodness, what a good movie. I was expecting it to be okay at best, as an adaptation and as a stand-alone film, but it was quite good on both of the points separately. And it got a very important part of the plot down--the letter in the cell, The Salt Flats bit, that I thought they'd mangle for sure.