I'm an anarchist and I still hate this movie

Rating: 1/10 (23 March 2006)

From someone who read the graphic novel before I knew the movie was coming out, the movie was incredibly disappointing. The style was so wrong. Way too flashy, not gritty or dark enough. All the human elements of the comic were totally lost. The relationships between the politicians and their wives, which gave some depth to the characters, were completely taken out. The politician characters were just robots, as was V. They made him like a PG superhero - no style, no substance. The whole thing was incredibly fake. I could have accepted the lack of depth if they'd made it really, really cool. But it was just cheesy.
A lot of the darker, more subversive elements were taken out. For example, when the detective visits Larkhill in the book, he goes on acid. That could have been done really cool in the movie. But it was left out. Also, Evey is supposed to be poor, and the society is supposed to be a lot more repressed. In the book, V finds her working as a prostitute. I think they decided to make her, and the rest of the country, more middle class to prove some sort of point about material wealth making people apathetic.
Which is the real problem with the movie. They took a totally cool book (written in the 80s, I think), and added a whole bunch of unnecessary modern political context. All the overt references to terrorism, U.S. wars, avian flu, biological warfare, media control, plus the overdone Nazi imagery. Just ridiculous. They could have made it much, much more subtle and (I hope) people still would have understood what it was getting at. If they were trying to make something politically persuasive, they totally failed. It'll just offend Conservative-minded people, and it's too stupid to have any real value. The only people I can imagine liking this are really dumb liberals. Plus, it's just not cool at all.