V for Vendetta
Reviewed by Paul Benjamin
I hope that some ultraconservative group will hear about this film and encourage the world to boycott it. That way more people will go see it.
I first read Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta, about a masked freedom fighter terrorizing a fascist near-future British government, as a teenager. Having read it again a few months ago, I went to the film adaptation worried that updating the original story and pandering to current political correctness would deaden the power of the narrative. After the 2005 bombing of the London Underground, would Warner Bros. balk at antihero V’s highly destructive acts of terror? Would they let the director James McTeigue (veteran of the Matrix movies, Attack of the Clones and Dark City, among others) and The Matrix’s Wachowski brothers make V a terrorist/freedom fighter? Or would they water down the story to make him a squeaky clean hero, or to make the government seem either not so bad or horribly worse than in the graphic novel?
I needn’t have worried. It’s true that limited nuclear strikes become targeted germ warfare, bombing targets change, and riots are replaced with more symbolic civil disobedience, but this is not a neutered version of Moore's and David Lloyd’s brilliant comic. It is a focused adaptation tailored for the screen. Some of the details have changed, but the spirit remains the same. It is about a government that took power in a time of great upheaval and uses the populace’s own fear to control it.
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http://www.revolutionsf.com/article.html?id=3042 
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