This weekend my wife and I rented V for Vendetta.  What a horrible choice that was.  It was long, boring and preachy.  We knew we were in for ride during the opening scene when the voice of the dictatorship blamed the collapse of America on acceptance of Muslims and Homosexuals.  As if radical Islam does not currently pose the most prominent threat to this country and gay marriage one of the most prominent debates on the structure of society.   

V, the hero of the movie, is labeled a terrorist by the oppressive regime he is resisting.  What’s more, V spent a significant amount of time in a concentration camp that conducted experiments on humans, including V.  The officials that ran the camp are the main targets of our hero during his quest to start a popular uprising. 

 The politics are thick throughout the movie.  The regime owes much too the old Soviet states.  The populace lives in fear of the government, with the threat of disappearing during any given night hanging over their collective heads.   The movie uses imagery that is supposed to be remind one of Nazi Germany, giving their dictator a fascist spin.  The politics of the film are clearly left leaning, so it makes sense that the regime is more fascist then communist.  After all, it is easy for the left to refer to conservatives they don’t like as Nazi’s.  Really it doesn’t matter, if you died at the hands of Stalin, Mao or Hitler, you are just as dead.  Still, the movie creates an evil right wing dictatorship (despite the fact that the left wing communist are responsible for several million more deaths in the last century).  I can accept this premise if the movie is good, but it wasn’t.  The whole thing was bland and the movie never gave a good enough reason to care about V or his main accomplice Evey.  He was experimented on, but for what purpose?  Does he have some kind of superpower from the experiments?  He was abused and mistreated, but in what manner?  No one, audience or character gets to see beneath V’s mask, furthering the apathy toward the character.

As boring as the movie was, the real moral stupidity didn’t start until after the movie.  The extra’s feature a “making of” segment in which the cast members get the opportunity to expound on the politics of the movie.  The first thing that jumped at me was the comments about terrorism as a tactic.  Several different cast members, Hugo Weaving chief among them, point to V’s use of terror tactics and equivocates between V and real life terrorists.  Wait a second, because your fictional character uses terror, that means that it’s okay to shoot up a Jewish Center, and bomb buildings?  This kind of silliness is what concerns me most about our ability as a free society to combat Islamic fundamentalism.  That the star of the film can recognize no difference between the fictional V- who targets: government agents, those who torture him and clearly declared targets, wears a uniform (of sorts), and announces his main target ahead of time- and those who hide behind and intentionally target civilians says a lot about our current media culture.  Islamic fundamentalist aren’t trying eliminate free states, or impose Sharia, in the eyes of Hugo Weaving, they are misunderstood freedom fighters.

It would have been so easy to make V a great freedom fighter, but instead we got morally ambiguous mush. 

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