Futuristic British world, where the media panders to neo-Nazi thugss

Rating: 10/10 (30 August 2009)

As I pen this in the balmy days of spring, the tax days of mid-April are still in the rear view mirror, but I am looking forward to baking my body in Florida's relentless summer sunshine.
It is "betwixt and between" time for movies. It is too soon for the teenage, guilty-pleasure blockbuster of summer and the Academy nominees are drifting to the DVD and rental shelves. Nonetheless, for me, the movie theater still beckons.
I knew nothing about the V for Vendetta comic book series before seeing the movie. I was quite surprised by it. This is a futuristic British world, festooned with government cameras, where the media panders to neo-Nazi dressing fascist government of thugs.
The hero is a dark, Shakespearean quoting knight, wielding a chest full of Japanese fighting swords and a weirdly disturbing, grinning white mask. He saves the girl and introduces himself with a tongue-twisting soliloquy. The hero, V for Vendetta, challenges the government by threatening to blow-up a government building in the British tradition of Guy Fawkes. He is always one-step ahead of the bad guys, wreaking his murderous revenge for their cruelty and corruption.
The movie makes a unwittingly, depiction of the madness and inspiration of terrorists. Blow up the building, V thinks, and the public will see that a government trampling their individual rights is more of a threat than their irrational fears (yeah, right).
Although I pump my movies through my almost fantastic classic Klipsch Khorn loudspeakers system, I still appreciate movie theaters with speakers lining the walls and stadium seating. These venues are particularly good for action films, my favorite genre being the sci-fi action movie. In this case, it was a delight to wander into the big box and see a late spring entry. If you like the same genre, I think you will like V for Vendetta.
The domino scene (where V tips over black and red dominoes to form a giant letter V) involved 22,000 dominoes, was assembled by four professional domino assemblers, and took 200 hours to set up.
In the scene where V has Creedy cornered in the greenhouse, V plays Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. In Morse Code, the opening notes of this piece are "... _", or V. This is also the reason for the piece's enormous popularity in England during World War Two. (The Allied slogan was "V for Victory".) The Symphony's opening was used as a call-sign in the European broadcasts of the BBC during World War II in reference to Winston Churchill's "V for Victory".
The name Evey is pronounced EV, with E being the fifth letter of the alphabet, V being five in Latin and Y being the 25th letter (5 squared) On a clock that has an hour hand and a minute hand, the time 11:05 makes a V. These two numbers, 11 and 5, where 11 is November, and 5 is the day of November, spell out: the fifth of November. "Remember, remember the 5th of November." The voice-overs about the futility of non-violence and the definition of humanism that can be heard during the end credits are sound bites from speeches given by Malcolm X and Gloria Steinem, respectively.
In the memorial for those that died as a result of the virus, the statues are of children playing "Ring around the Rosie". There is a frequently cited (though untrue) urban legend that this nursery rhyme was about the bubonic plague.
SPOILER: When Evey is being captured by a member of the commando outside Dietrich's house, if we look closer, we can see that the commando member has burnt flesh (it is visible trough the commando mask's hole for the eyes), so it is obvious that he is V. But it is visible only for a second.