V is for very, very, bored

Rating: 1/10 (26 March 2006)

I kept waiting for something interesting to happen, but it didn't. I was squirming in my seat when the second hour rolled around. Perhaps if I had just taken a contemporary American society class at a liberal college this film would have dazzled me (that was me SEVERAL years ago), but the social commentary is nothing new to me now. I found the film to be old news and a bad photocopy of a lot of other films and ethics textbooks.
Basically the film romanticizes terrorism as a way to defeat a fascist government. The funny thing is that the government sets up the illusion of the country being threatened by terrorists doing biological warfare, when the government actually created these experiments in the first place. One of the experiments gets free and has a vendetta against the government. It has a similar plot to the recent Aeon Flux film without the cloning factor. The film also romanticizes homosexuality in an oppressive, Christian society. I'm not judging these aspects here, I just wanted to summarize the themes.
My main problems with the film: I found the characters to be two-dimensional, the plot to be predictable and the pacing to be painfully slow. The visuals were dark except for the scene with a pedophile bishop and lesbians falling in love. I didn't find the film inspiring. The dreary style and tone of the film dragged. Also the monologues kept pushing the same ideas. By the end, I didn't care what point the film was trying to make (I knew that within the first five minutes of the film from a long monologue). I just felt beaten down with repetition after two hours of being slapped in the face with liberalism. The theme didn't matter. It could have been fascism or Christianity and I would have felt the same way with this style of film-making
I wish I had just rented the director's cut of Blade Runner. It would have been way more satisfying.