Let's have a revolution about something else.

Rating: 5/10 (18 March 2006)

V for Vendetta.
The movie capitalized on a variety of current paranoias to sell it's message that the people are being suppressed, and so forth.
The setting is several decades or more in the future where things are much the same as they are today, technologically speaking. It's a world where the USA is in some kind of civil war and Britain is in a 1984-like condition of censorship and surveillance (oddly John Hurt plays the leader of the government, but also played the protagonist in the film version of 1984). This condition has sprung forth from some massive biological attack that occurred on the isles and inspired a very conservative turn of government to control the chaos.
The story about the plague is directly taken from the first Aeon Flux cartoon, was used in Ultraviolet, but weirdly was not used in the recent Aeon Flux movie. The Aeon Flux cartoon showed the story, without the use of words, of a scientist making a disease to become popular and assume control by then distributing the cure. Great idea! Again this idea was used in V, but has become tired.
Also, the movie suggested that every single bad thing of any import that happened in England, right down to bird flu, was the result of government manipulation. When the government isn't doing that they're rounding up homosexuals, banning art, and trying to eradicate "the beautiful poetry of the koran" from our minds. This appeals to what I consider to be massive cowardice on the part of some segment of our culture. If the government has manufactured everything, then it is controllable and understandable. It's like your nasty schoolmate pulling a prank on you. That helps to fight off the confusion and horror that a disease caught from a bird might kill everyone you know, or that a bunch of stinky foreigners want to blow you up and rape your girlfriend because god told them to.
Anyway, as a result of some very poorly described government experiment, a person that has been badly burned decides to take on the guise of Guy Fawkes (code name V) a man that tried to blow up parliament, due to reasons having little to do with the film, appears as the hero. He's played by Hugo Weaving (Agent Smith from the Matrix) and despite the fact that he wears a kind of theater mask throughout the whole film, does a great job. I attribute this to the perpetually pleasant voice that he maintains and his twisty and elegant dialogue. V has a kind of crazy smartness that you never see in American characters (yet another reason to move to England). He would have been a great character with had their been a different fight on his hands.
There was one character other than V that set the whole tone of why I didn't care for the movie too much. He's a closet good-guy (amongst other things) and a big time TV star. While helping Natalie Portman he relieves his secret room where he keeps all of his contraband. In this reality, contraband is mostly the art object , but in this man's chamber we find more. He's got a copy of the koran! As mentioned above, he remarks about it's beautiful poetry and I found it amusing that it was clearly written in Arabic, and that meant to me that like most people that praise the fascist work he had probably never read it. Then, the camera does a quick scan across some creepy gay sado-looking photos that the guy keeps on the wall. He then admits to Portman that he likes guys and that is the motivation for his revolutionary leanings. I guess that he forgot that the muslims would try to kill him if they were in charge too. Oh well, he's a man living in confusing times.
So, the whole movie is about having a revolution about government conspiracies, homosexuality, and the koran. There's an old song that states "the revolution will not be televised" and if the same goes for this one then I'm afraid I'll have to miss it.
Getting away from the movie for a minute, I would like to know why liberals seemed to have abandoned the idea of revolutions over economic conditions. The average American is going to rack up over 50,000 in debt that they will never pay off in their lifetime and that amounts to them being an owned slave. How does that as an issue compare to the defense of a bizarre foreign religion, blaming every miserable event on the government, and maintaining top priority for the sexually anomalous? Friends, I suggest to you that the very people that permit books to be published and have the money to make films are the same people that make you slaves by playing the debt game with you. They want you to stick up for the infantile exploration of genitalia related issues, while they overtly and covertly own you and your entire family from now until....when? So, go and rent fight club if you want a little truth in an action/fantasy movie.