Vermurkste Verfilmung Von Visionärer Vorlage"

Rating: 3/10 (17 April 2008)

(="Screwed up theatrical adaption from a visionary tale")
The Wachovskies continued here what the already did with their Matrix trilogy: while the first part was an interesting and highly entertaining variation of Descarte's methodic doubt (do I really exist, or is all that I see, hear and smell just the coincidental one-second-glimpse imagination of a one-cell bacteria which I truly am?"; watch Carpenter's Dark Star" for more details), they dismantled it themselves with two sheer-below-mediocre sequels with virtuous but pointless action, plot-hole-chains, horrible performances, grotesque attempts in coolness and hazardous dialogs.
When I read Vendetta" first in about '91 or so, I was once more reminded that we're yet not safe from the menace which my country unleashed over the world in the 30s and 40s last century and that it can occur anytime anywhere again. The vision of the novel was as credible, authentic and fearsome as many news-broadcasts today. Which is what the author tried to accomplish as he mentioned in his foreword in the trade-paper-release I owned then. If I recall correct he mourned about cheeky (cheery?) and cheesy, soaps, comedies and music-shows" and about ... people who turn off the news..." there. He dedicated the novel to ... people who don't turn off the news..."
The Vendetta"-movie-adaption is for people who turn off the news.
A valuable blueprint of a possible dystopia which played in the same league as 1984", Fahrenheit 451" or Brazil" has been turned into a useless action-flick, lacking any political ambition or any attempt to subversively play with the viewers perceptions and political convictions. You leave the theater without anything to cut your teeth into or a matter to discuss controversially. And that despite the fact that the story today has enough actual events to function as an allegory for, as it had when it was written (war-propaganda, media-control, cutting of civil-rights, unbalanced and misanthropic economy etc). Hell, even Mad Max II" was probably more political than this flick.
All the characters were real in the novel and became comic-characters in the film. Especially V" is now a one-dimensional clown who rushes through the dialogs like a rabid rocket and through all the fighting-scenes like the energy-cell-rabbit: It has no blood, no animae..." (Grosse Point Blank"). All those brilliantly placed quotes from literature-history that V used on any given occasion and during any terrorist action in the book turn into a what-did-he-mumble jelly here. Too fast for everybody who didn't read the novel, hell even too fast for those who did and -worst of all- too fast to celebrate the punchlines behind them. Who swaps drama for dynamic, deserves to lose both.
The story is an only fast forward. The fear of a fictional but credible fascistic regime that drowned out of every page of the novel got replaced by constant sensory-nervous-system-attacks and by the annoyment and anger about todays regular one-cut-per-second-editing-for-the-Mtv-generation; If it's too slow, people can't follow." God, I miss Alfred Hitchcock...
I paid much attention on the Konzentrationslager-background of V but it didn't struck me at all as it did while reading it. Au contraire: Look what a cool fighter V has become there. Gee, Concentration-Camps can't be that bad..." Folks, this is dangerous!
It's plain obvious that it was the wrong decision to let some non-UK-filmmakers do the project; some British would have better done this. No anti-americanism here, not at all, but the priorities would have probably been set elsewhere then and for sure on the more essential aspects than just on the visual and martial-arts. All the important side-stories were cut too. They should fold the Watchmen"-project right now.
Turn on, Turn on, Turn on - THE NEWS!!!" (Hüsker Dü)
My recommendation: Das Leben Der Anderen"