So. Yeah, I saw V for Vendetta the day it came out (or actually at 10pm the night before if you want to get technical) and I've been reading various flisters' reactions to it and I just. Hmmm. okay let's start off with the fact that I'm super-political (although not an anarchist,) and that I take my comic books to heart when they're as good as the V for Vendetta book is. So I think I've been pretty surprised to see so many people have positive reactions to the movie. I've seen a lot of comments from people who never read the book who thought it was a really powerful movie. And I pretty much had the complete opposite reaction.

My bottom line reaction: the movie was a watered down, poorly adapted piece of (somewhat entertaining) crap.

See, the book is an amazingly visceral read and Alan Moore was a brilliant story teller back then. But he doesn't write books that could be easily translated over to another medium. He writes books that are absolutely perfect for the genre. He writes stories that couldn't be told in any other form than a comic book. His stories need to be illustrated because half the action takes place in the pictures. And he plots his stories in pieces that don't seem to fit together at all in the beginning until they come together in this horrifying convergence of events and coincidences and seemingly unimportant details that reveal themselves to be key in the end. But you can't make a movie that way because you can't go back to the beginning and pick up those threads in a movie the way you can in a book. Alan Moore is, quite simply, a brilliant comic writer (or at least he used to be in the good old days when he was writing about nuclear apocalypses and corrupt super-heros.)

V for Vendetta the book is set in a post-nuclear war, post-apocalyptic world where everything's gone to shit and the Fascist party did what it does best and took advantage of the chaos to seize power. They killed all of the black people, all of the muslims, all of the gay people and everyone who ever even thought about thinking something bad about the government. The controlled all communications, they surveilled every fucking house and every single street in england. They closed the borders and restricted everything. They were in complete and unquestioned control. And life wasn't shiny for the survivors. There weren't brand new tvs in every house and Evey was not a pretty little cultured employee of the new BBC. She was a broke, scared, naive young girl who went out trying to turn her first trick the night she got caught by the law and V blew up the Old Bailey. Alan Moore, quite simply, wrote about the world that everyone feared was just around the corner should the worst happen. We've seen it before in history and we've seen it before in books and we should all recognize it as being a terrifyingly few steps away from the one in which we actually live.

And V was an anarchist. Explicitly. His only goal was to show England that they didn't have to cower in fear of their government. People shouldn't live in fear of their government, the government should fear the people. V understood that. And his aim was to prove to people that they were wrong to have given in and let the totalitarian government carry out atrocities in their names. He had been turned into a monster by the government and he understood that what he was doing, using terrorist tactics, was a monstrous thing to do. V had no desire to be a leader, he knew that the only thing he would ever be able to do was be the destructive force in taking down the government. But he believed that anarchy had two phases: the initial destructive phase, and the construction phase after that.

So he groomed Evey to be the builder. When he dies at the end of the book Evey put on his mask and set out to build a new society. She could do that when he couldn't because she hadn't been made into a monster by the government she was fighting against. She was hopeful and she was hope for England. Can you begin to see the differences between book and movie?

I don't think it would be possible for me to have been more displeased by a movie adapted by two guys who claim to be both anarchists and comics fans. Seriously if you haven't read the book and you liked the movie, read the book, it's better. And then read Alan Moore's Watchmen because it's fantastic too and you should all have the chance to read it before it's bastardized into a shitty, one dimensional action movie sometime in 2007.