V for Vendetta
Saw V for Vendetta this weekend. Nice movie, but the graphic novel was better. Which is to be expected — film adaptations of great literature are almost always worse than the original. The movie is substantially different from the book; some of the changes the Wachowski brothers made included:
- The historical background for the book was nuclear war which had destroyed most of the world except for Britain. That played well in the early 80’s (Alan Moore and David Lloyd had written the graphic novel in 1982-83) but today, perhaps, sounds dated. The movie substituted bio-terrorism for nuclear strikes.
- The Wachowskis have gentrifies Alan Moore’s material. The movie has none of the poverty, grittiness, or grime of the book; the movie shows Fascist London as a clean, bright, cheerful and well-off city. In the book, Evey Hammond is a factory worker/inept prostitute; the movie turns her into an office worker. In the book, Gordon is a poor, straight criminal who hangs out in girlie bars; in the movie, he is a wealthy, gay comedian who collects paintings. Evey does remark in the movie that there are butter shortages; but all the actors in the movie — well-dressed, well-nourished, living in spacious houses, working in beautiful clean office buildings — really do not look like the sort of people who stand for hours in a butter line. The British people in the movie don’t even know how to riot properly. In the book, the nation is gripped by looting and anarchic violence. In the movie, there are minor riots in Brixton and a sort of demonstration/happening in front of the Houses of Parliament. I am really not sure why the Wachowskis decided to do away with the book’s atmosphere. Maybe they thought that a modern middle-class audience would more easily identify with modern middle-class characters?
- The movie cuts out all the material about the Party leadership; all it shows are five talking heads around a table, telling the Leader why they can’t find the terrorist. That is a shame. The movie leaves out all details about fascinating characters such as Conrad and Helen Heyer, Derek and Rosemary Almond, and Dascombe. The movie presents the Leader (Chancellor in the movie) and Creedy as simple authoritarian thugs; the book paints a fascinating psychological profile of a pair of monsters. I suppose that including all these characters would have made the movie siginificantly longer. However, without them, it loses much of the book’s strength. A hero strugging against a run-of-the-mill evil oppressive government is Hollywood banality. A human struggling against individual, distinct humans — who together somehow add up to an evil oppressive government — is art.
- And similarly, London’s criminal underworld has been excized. Ally and Gordon’s other associates do not show up at all in the movie. Shame, that.
- And Fate, the supercomputer with which the Party controlled the country, does not show up in the movie either. That means the fascinationg relationship between the Leader, the Computer, and the Terrorist does not appear.
- Finally, V’s plans, bombs, strategems, and methods for inspiring civil disobedience have been completely rearranged. The book starts with V blowing up Parliament. The movie ends with it. To be honest, I am not sure which version I like best. In some ways, the movie’s gunpowder plot is cleverer than the book’s.
Still, the film is good. Considering the ever-eroding civil liberties and ever-increasing government surveillance, it is very timely. And Natalie Portman — who plays Evey — acts well (seems that she is quite a talented actress, as long as she is not working under a totally incompetent director).