Talking About Stuff, with Mike and Christiana

Housekeeping Note: I've started double-posting all of the blog entries for the last few days over at my livejournal site as well, and will probably continue to do that for now, but as things evolve, I will probably begin to use that site for my personal-blogging sorts of things, and this site more for podcast notes and announcements, etc.

Anyway...

V for Vendetta

Okay, I had been planning to see this movie anyway, but over the weekend it seemed like everyone was talking about it already and so I figured I just had to get out to the theater.

I haven't read the graphic novel, (though I've read The Watchmen, also by Alan Moore,) and so I had a general idea of what KIND of story I was in for, if not the specifics.

The movie is good, but not great. I like it on two levels really, but on only one of those is the movie as effective as it wants to be.

That first level, of course, is the more superficial level of "Does it look cool?"

Yes. It does. Very cool. All kinds of shadows and glinty knives and black and red and bathrooms with giant TV's in them. (Well only one of those, but it was cool, in a ridiculously over-the-top-narcissistic way.)

The fighting is cool, lots of evocative imagery, etc. It's a good looking film, which to some extent, isn't surprising, since it's brought to us by the Wachowski Brothers, most famous for the Matrix trilogy.

They've always been solid on the technical/directorial level, less so on the story level, so it's good that they're working with some top-notch (so I've been told) source material.

That brings me to the second level I referred to above. The film is "pretty good" on the story level, but I felt as though what I liked was the original material shining through a dirty lens. You can still see the broad strokes of what was there, but the texture is blurred a little bit, the motives become a little less nuanced, the ambiguity a little more black-and-white.

I could go into some specifics on that, but I won't. Instead, I'll refer you to this excellent discussion of the film/book. Warning: Complete spoilers (Thanks to Elizabeth Bear for pointing the way.) Basically, it seems to me that the film is all about ends versus means. The character of V could be a fearless revolutionary, or a warped, psychotic terrorist, depending on your point of view, and the story really made me think about a lot of things related to that. At what point do you draw the line between "La Resistance" and "Terrorists"? At what point does "security" become "oppression"? At what point does "tough love" become "sadism"? (By the way, for an amusing take on the Star Wars Universe, check out "A Different Point of View" over at Podiobooks.com. After subscribing to Nina Kimberly the Merciless, of course.)

I really enjoyed being provoked to think about all those things, but again, I felt like it was the source material doing the provoking, whereas the film seems a little more inclined to go ahead and choose an answer. Still, I have to give the film credit that the message was not totally obscured, because all those questions did still come through. A dirty lens is a hell of a lot better than nothing, but I think I'm going to go ahead and check out the original graphic novel too.