Today I watched the movie V for Vendetta. I suspect that I liked it more than most of my peers.
Maybe the most obvious criticism is that the character V is comically horrifying and ridiculous in multiple ways. He watches movies featuring duels between knights and reenacts them, with all the associated delusions of grandeur. He pretends to lock Evey in jail and tortures her regularly, to show her “what its like” and to harden her, make her lose her fear. This is insane behavior. I think the point to take away from this is not to consider V really as a person. I think the movie encourages this: they deliberately never say his name and never show his face. V really is supposed to be a symbol as opposed to a character you’re supposed to empathize with. Anyone who imagines themselves as V in some sort of masturbatory power fantasy isn’t getting the point of the movie.
Although the portrayal of V seems to imply that one person can effectively bring down a government, I think this is more realistic than people might initially think. V dedicated 20 years of his life to this mission, and he clearly has extraordinary abilities. People regularly underestimate both themselves and resistance: something I also appreciated was throughout the movie we learned that people that seemed all fine and dandy (e.g Gordon) were in fact resisting.
I did have one major problem with the movie, which was that Evey was much too underdeveloped as a character. I would have liked to see a movie that focused primarily on her, and used V to push the plot along with his antics and such. Near the end off the movie Evey is just vaguely around for months. She says she got a fake ID but that’s about all we’re given. This should have been the focus of the movie, because in the end you want to portray how *real* people react to dystopia, not a force of nature like V. Because of this it really just ends up being more of a fantasy as opposed to a movie that people are supposed to imagine themselves in. It’s less scary than a movie about dystopia should be. There’s a reason that 1984 ended the way it did.
I agree that Evey was a largely underdeveloped character. It seems like they went to a great deal of trouble to give her an incredibly rich backstory, yet it ultimately went nowhere. Her character was primarily used to demonstrate the humanity of the otherwise ridiculous V, rather than have any independent character development. Even the scene of her so-called transformation in the rain was directly paralleled with V’s, which I felt diminished an otherwise powerful moment. I think greater dimensionality of her character could have made her role in the final scenes far more powerful.
Good point with respect to the backstory. Although them paralleling her transformation with V’s transformation kind of took the air out of the moment, I do think it helped explain V’s motivation: he was truly trying to mold Evey as a replacement for him, as we saw at the end of the movie.
I never thought of that perspective of viewing V as a symbol rather than a character to sympathize with. Perhaps that’s why he never takes off his mask and at the end of the film Evey states that he symbolized all people.