What's Missing from the V for Vendetta Movie
I saw V for Vendetta last Saturday night at the Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar. I can't place exactly when I first heard about the graphic novel and the movie from which it was based, but it would have been sometime in the middle of last year. I bought the former in September and enjoyed it greatly. Alan Moore and David Lloyd did an excellent job.
I've been cautious in reading advance reviews of the movie adaptation and other than the previous mention of Molly Saves the Day's note of the problematic novelization, I haven't really looked into the structure and substance of the film.
I reread "Volume 1: Europe After The Reign" last night. I'll work through the other two volumes this week to refresh my memory.
So what's missing from V for Vendetta that is in the graphic novel? Is any of it important to the theme of the original work?
Yes. Spoilers below.
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The movie, despite quite effectively tying in current hot topic political events to the plot, just isn't political. The movie is in mid-air, starting in motion without a foundation. As Molly discovered when she read the novelization, the radical nature of V and his philosophy is almost absent. I don't recall hearing the word "anarchy" in the dialogue even once, seemingly replaced with "chaos" as necessary. Fascism, if I recall correctly, barely gets a mention even though the environment is obviously portrayed as such. This was a movie about being against a particular, nasty state...not a movie about being against The State in principle and not just the particular nasty version encountered in the story. The reasons V is against The State are gone, switched out with reasons we generally recognize as being legitimate when faced with the kind of overarching control exercised by the British Government in the movie. That right there kills half of the graphic novel's excitement and relevance. "People should not be afraid of their governments; governments should be afraid of their people"...blaming voters for the governments they enable...that just isn't enough.
The Land of Do-As-You Please is completely missing, as well as the crucial juxtaposition of it with The Land of Take What You Want. The concepts here are simply irreplaceable and damage the final product. Presenting them is the counterpoint to the universal knee-jerk reaction to any anti-state sentiment: "but without the government, won't there be violent chaos?"
V didn't just blow up Parliament and the Old Bailey. He also obliterated Party and agency buildings, manipulated the fear of the ruling establishment to go after each other, and told the nation they were no longer under constant surveillance.
Adam Susan, the Party Leader in the graphic novel, is replaced with a widescreen ranting head who has become a one-dimensional caricature that retains one aspect of Susan (totalitarianism) but loses the why. His internal monologue explaining fascism is cut, removing another crucial philosophical aspect from the original.
V's ironic and murderous modus operandi were almost entirely excised, with the exception of how he dealt with Delia Surridge. Though V did use "common household chemicals" for a great deal of his work, he didn't kill the Bishop Lilliman or Prothero by injecting them with some crude mixture of bleach, insect repellant, and ammonia. He didn't kill Prothero at all! He drove him insane with a massive dose of LSD and killed Lilliman by forcing him to eat a communion wafer laced with poison.
Missing from both those events are some great details, such as the attention is paid to the fact that the new Voice of Fate (another term missing from the movie) isn't the same as before.
The scene where the television talk show host lampoons the Party Leader trying to capture V, if I remember correctly, does not exist in the original work. However I thought it was a good addition, particularly in the way it tied in Benny Hill's "Yakety Sax" theme music.
More to come later. Let me be clear that I did like the movie for what it was and I understand the inevitable clash of a large and complex body of work with the restrictions of a 132-minute motion picture. I have some criticism of the direction and the acting and the script, but I will certainly buy the DVD and will probably go see it in the theater again.