Origin:

In the not too distant future Britain has a fascist government run by faceless men and women intent only on keeping the masses supressed. However, one figure stands against this oppression: a figure known only as V, who wears a Guy Fawkes mask, a cloak and shows a propensity for sharp cutlery.

This Orwellian vision of the future is the premise for the strip V for Vendetta which ran in glorious black and white in the pages of Warrior Magazine (1982). Warrior lasted a total of 26 issues stretched over some 3 years, and during its time ran some of the best stories drawn and written by Britain's new generation of artists.

The strip was later re-issued (in colour) by DC National.

According to sources, Mr. Moore (From Hell and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) has distanced himself from this endeavour: a pity.

Synopsis:

Thumb suckers of the world unite, the most hotly anticipated film of the, er, week, V for Vendetta, has arrived, complete with manufactured buzz and some apparently genuine British outrage. Concocted by the same team behind the Matrix franchise, this future-shock story about a masked avenger at war with a totalitarian British regime was drawn along the usual Orwellian lines but is clearly meant to have more than a passing resemblance to our current political environment.

Is the man in the mask who wants to make Parliament go boom Osama bin Laden or Patrick Henry? Or just a Phantom of the Opera clone who likes to kick back to the cult sounds of Antony and the Johnsons? Your guess is as good as mine, and I've seen the film.

Written by Alan Moore and illustrated by David Lloyd, V for Vendetta originated as a limited comic series in the early 1980's, just around the time that Margaret Thatcher was re-elected for the second of three terms. Like the comic, the film is set in a near future, though now the time stamp is circa 2020. America, glimpsed only in passing on television, is paralyzed by civil unrest, having unleashed worldwide havoc; Britain has fallen to fascism; no word yet, though, on Luxembourg.

The usual totalitarian hard line prevails (no dissent, no diversity, no fun) as does the usual movie-villain aesthetic. The shock troops wear basic black with crimson accents, while the leader, played by John Hurt in a goatee drizzled with spit, parts his hair like Hitler.

The film, which follows Mr. Moore's story in broad outline, updating it with dead-end allusions to Islam, was adapted to the screen by Andy and Larry Wachowski and directed by one of their former assistant directors, James McTeigue. (Notably, Mr. Moore is having nothing to do with the film.)

One night after curfew, a young woman, Evey (Natalie Portman, looking and sounding all of 12), is saved from an assault by a man in a Guy Fawkes mask who introduces himself as V (Hugo Weaving, wasted under his costume). V slices and dices Evey's troubles away, topping off his handiwork first by reciting some vacuous verse and then by blowing up the Old Bailey. She's perplexed, but like any impressionable youngster with daddy issues and no money for therapy, she's also interested. One thing leads to another and, V for voilà, a minor league of extraordinary soul mates is born.

Mr. Moore's pretensions to seriousness may be seriously pretentious, but he seeks to elevate the level of conversation that has been inevitably lowered by the screen adaptations of his work. "V for Vendetta" is the worst offender in this regard, largely because the Wachowskis come equipped with their own fancy reading list and set of narrative and ideological imperatives.

Not long after V rescues Evey, she returns the favor, only to end up on the most-wanted list, chased by the police (meaning, for the most part, Stephen Rea). Far from the prying eyes and ears of state surveillance, V brings Evey back to his digs, a bachelor pad tricked out with movie posters, books, a Francis Bacon painting and Julie London pleading "Cry Me a River." All that's missing is a shag carpet and Miss July.

Despite his kinky getup, V has other things on his mind than ravaging his house guest — like watching the 1934 chestnut "The Count of Monte Cristo" with Evey while curled up on the couch. Mr. Moore's story owes much to the Dumas (père) novel about a wrongly imprisoned commoner turned wealthy avenger, but it differs significantly in how it puts vengeance and man over forgiveness and God, and more or less jettisons the love angle. Unlike the Count, V remains a lone avenging angel to the big-bang end, which does help give this sluggish affair a much-needed resuscitating jolt. Made mostly on sound stages and computers, with 3-D models doubling for monuments, the film looks and sounds as canned as a Buck Rogers serial, though this weighs in less like a conscious aesthetic strategy than a function of poor technique.

Mr. McTeigue, who probably received some guidance from the Wachowskis (they also served as producers), never manages to make this Goth dystopia pop. Like the last two installments of the "Matrix" cycle, this film sags when it should zip, weighted down with self-importance and some dubious thinking.

The Wachowskis appear deeply enamored of the great (super) man theory of history, with mysterioso leaders who are intent on delivering the rest of us from false consciousness. Given this, it's no surprise that the geopolitical terrain staked out in this film skews so last century: globalization having been given the jackboot, partly, one imagines, because multinational capitalism, with its total market value and shareholder wealth, doesn't register as cool as all that shiny, shiny leather and crypto-Nazi styling.

Then again, the idea that revolution can come from the ground up doesn't jibe with the great director theory of film history, either. One of the more interesting things about Mr. Moore's comic, along with V's contradictions and cartoon dialectics ("anarchy wears two faces," V intones), is how many different characters take possession of the story at different times.

The screenplay, by contrast, essentially carves the plot into two parallel narrative strands — V and Evey occupy one, the fascists and their henchmen the other — that eventually twist together as predictably as in any blockbuster blowout. Working in a medium and at a scale that allows him to conceptualize outside the lines, Mr. Moore wags his finger at the masses, blaming them for their dire straits, but he also hands much of the story over to them.

Initially scheduled to be released in November 2005, to coincide with Guy Fawkes Day, the film was delayed in the wake of the July bombing attacks in London. Since then, inevitable questions and objections have been raised about whether "V for Vendetta" turns a terrorist into a hero, which is precisely what it does do. Predictably, the filmmakers, actors and media savants have floated the familiar formulation that one man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter, as if this actually explained anything about how terror and power (never mind movies) work.

© Manohla Dargis, New York Times

Prequels, Sequels and Follow-ons:

None