V

I took in "V for Vendetta" on the weekend. It was one of those films that, when you walk out of the theatre, you don’t want your 10 bucks back, but gets crappier the more you think about it. My overall impression was of a film whose creators wanted to walk the fine line between Message Movie and Action Flick, but wound up missing the mark on both counts. The few action sequences were straight Matrix retreads, all billowing capes, blurred knives and blood going squirting-psssssh!-in slow motion: nothing groundbreaking or even particularly interesting. The Message? Well, it would have been nice if they had tried to create a Chilling, Yet Plausible Vision of a Totalitarian Dystopia instead of just cobbling together a bunch of Nazi imagery and Orwell references (fun fact: John Hurt, who plays Big Br…er…the High Chancellor in “V…” portrayed Winston Smith in1984’s “1984”) with a few allusions to the “War on Terror” for the sake of appearing timely. But subtlety is not something you go looking for in a Wachowski-penned action pic or in American cinema as a whole (incidentally, I wonder if this project would have fared better in the hands of a British creative team). Anyway, the point is the message that fascism can happen here is most definitely lost when you simply re-hash old signifiers; fascism is an idea, not just a pair of jackboots.

Another aspect of “V…” that I found wanting was the visual scope. The bulk of the action is centred on a handful of interior locations (the government’s “star chamber”, V’s lair, the detective’s office and a few others) making the film seem very limited: after two hours of that, the (brief) “sweeping“ climax feels tacked on. And I’m not talking small in a claustrophobic way (which would have conveyed the stifling oppression of the regime). Nor was the film big enough to demonstrate the size and scope of the government’s oppression and the enormity of the struggle against it. It was just…small.

The last thing that bugged me was the filmmakers do a piss poor job of relating what life is like under this brutal, totalitarian regime. For example, Natalie Portman’s character works at a FOXNews style propaganda network, but it doesn’t seem like it’s much different from working at Clear Channel. The rants of the station’s main attraction and resident government mouth piece don’t sound too far off of what you hear on U.S. talk radio, the people seem pretty much doing what people do today. And maybe that was the point. Maybe what they were trying to do was show the banality of evil: not only can fascism come here, when it does, you won’t even notice it (or you might even welcome it). But that doesn’t square with the atmosphere of constant fear the Wachowski’s keeping telling us the people live under, let alone the sheer spectacle the regime makes of itself. Really, the only window we get into the lives of ordinary people are a bunch of reoccurring shots of various families and individuals watching events unfold on the TV (except at the end where we see the empty living rooms and pub: the people have stopped watching and have started participating. Get it? Get it?), It’s a ham-fisted device that only underscores the filmmakers’ limitations.

In the end, there isn’t much to recommend “V for Vendetta” other than the fetching Ms. Portman. “12 Monkeys” and “Brazil” do a far better job of conjuring a nightmarish world, while films like “Syriana” nail the timely down cold. And while “V…” is Citizen fucking Kane compared to the next “Fast and the Furious” installment (the trailer for which drew appreciative applause from douchebags at the Saturday screening), it is, at best, a well-intentioned mess. A good idea, poorly executed; I wonder why they try at all.