V for Vendetta. posted by Richard Seymour

Oh. My. God. The Wachowski Brothers, obviously clawing back some credibility after Matrices 2 and 3, adapted the original comic book into a screenplay, and this brilliant film is the result. Justin Raimondo has already written this up excellently, so I won't go into too much detail. Long story short, an anarchist terrorist mounts a campaign against a viciously fascist British government - a government that uses torture, renditions, secret detention, which monitors its citizens relentlessly all the better to police and manipulate them, which feeds bogus news stories and which inflicts biological horror on the public (only to scapegoat and execute un-named religious extremists). The "former US" is plunged in chaos civil war partly as a result of its imperial misadventures, and the new British imperium regards it with amused contempt. The masses, meanwhile, are cynical but despondent. The media cheerfully and sunnily vends state lies, which no one believes, but which they are not at liberty to challenge. And then 'V' turns up on their television screens, and the state no longer controls the spectacle.

The contemporary references are obvious: war, terror, renditions, anti-Muslim racism, street protests - less obvious are the Eighties references (the original stories were written in 1982, I think). The gay liberation politics prominent in the film reflects the then prevalent media hysteria about AIDS and homosexuality. The focus on government authoritarianism and secrecy reflects the bunkering of the Thatcherite government, as does the replayed footage of what looks like a mixture of scenes from the miners' strike, the poll tax riots, and the Brixton and Toxteth uprisings. Hugo Weaving is brilliant as the masked avenger, John Hurt madly persuasive as the splenetic dictator of the 'Reclaimation', Stephen Fry on charming form as a homosexual television comedian who - hmmmm, maybe that wasn't such a challenge. It's not often a top ten box office film goes as far as this. Go see. Go see!