The west only survives...

Rating: 8/10 (18 March 2006)

As a hardcore fan of the comic book, I was afraid when I went to watch the movie ... but I had at the same time some hope on the sort of insight that made The Matrix -not its sequels- the huge thing it was.
With a series of minor absurd changes to the book (V in love with Evey? Please...) and things that should not have left behind in the book (anarchy, the message in front of TV, LSD), I think the movie is very well executed, and that it brings a message which is becoming essential, lest we end up finally losing the fight for reality.
When I say "the fight for reality" I do not necessarily mean a strictly anarchist point of view, or whatever. I mean the simulation we play which they tried to point out on Matrix, the depths through which consumerist culture has thrown us into a new Dark Age in which behaviors, likes and dislikes and anything we believe is our "will" is expertly conditioned by an omnipresent media which models such will.
While as Matrix was a statement on the nature of the Simulation, even pointing towards philosopher Jean Baudrillard inside the movie, the way in which the Wachowsky brothers have depicted V for Vendetta is the very structure of the Simulation. The message is very simple, wake up, think for yourself, we have delegated too much time our will on these powers that are now extending their means to control it. Democracy, though it is an advancement, is still a method of government in which the economic blocks fight among themselves for power through political puppets of every sign, and a method of government in which certain rules -such as the need for workers to sell themselves to those in control of the economy- cannot be changed.
In other words, as the laibachian sentence said: "The West only survives because it slyly established a system which insists on people's freedom. That is to say, under democracy, people believe they are acting according to their own wills and desires."
This is an important movie. Go watch it.