It’s no secret that Alan Moore stories always seem to be turned into crappy movies and V for Vendetta just may be the worst of them all....
Let’s start with the topic of tone. In general, the filmmakers (Director James McTeigue and screenwriters the Wachowski Brothers) changed the tone to something comic, almost tongue-in-cheek. At times, the tone becomes a sappy, almost nostalgic tone. It’s not just that they created a less dark version, but they created a version that takes itself less seriously.
As far as main characters, I will begin with V. In general, I didn’t dislike him too bad, except for his occasional melodramatic, overly light-hearted and cheeky attitude. When we first hear from Hugo Weaving, playing V in the film, he is delivering a long-winded monologue, apparently for Evey’s sake. Unfortunately, that sort of over-indulgence and phony intellectuality sets the tone for much of V’s presence in the film.
Evey’s character was more destructively altered in the film. In the book, she is introduced to us as completely vulnerable, having barely survived the post-nuclear weather, the loss of her father and a childhood living with her widowed mother in a work camp after the nuclear winter. After all that, she then resorts to prostitution and is saved from rape and potential death by a group of Fingermen. Through the course of the narrative we see her drown in her suffering and self-doubt and eventually, aided by V’s tough love, redefine herself and come out self-reliant. In the movie, she is just like everybody else. She works a normal 9-to-5 job and hides any vulnerability from the world around her. She doesn’t seem vulnerable at all, except for some distant memories of her parents’ abduction by the government, and she might even seem content with her life. There is so much less of a story arc for her to travel in the film. But in an interesting twist, the screenwriters do make Evey weaker in one regard. They make her rat out V and his plan to the Bishop.
The filmmakers also added an epidemic to the back-story, with a conspiracy between a pharmaceutical company and the government as an added plot-point. I may be wrong, but I think a good old-fashioned story about nuclear winter, and the rise of a genocidal regime over a weak and tired people still makes a compelling fable. I’m not ruling out that drug companies could be run by evil-minded people and that they could be in league with governments, but I am saying that they aren’t needed to make V for Vendetta a better tale.
There was also a general difference between the two versions in regards to the outlook towards the citizenry. In the book, Alan Moore’s writing told me that the citizens were complicit in England’s current state of affairs, that they had become weak and lazy and content in their false sense of security, allowing injustices, no matter the cost to their neighbors and friends. In the original V actually delivers a rather explicit public address to that effect. In the film, however, all popular guilt and responsibility was written out and the masses were depicted as having been taken hostage, somehow unwillingly, by the state. In the movie V also delivers a rather explicit public address to that effect.
I will now whine about a few things in the final moments of the movie. Why was there a mass of marching people in Guy Fawkes masks? Sitting through that whole “revolution lives in all of us” schtick was like drinking castor oil. Furthermore, why did the filmmakers have V take on a dozen or less heavily-armed fingermen and Creedy (practically the big bad) during an over-the-top, Matrix-like action sequence. Is Agent Smith behind that mask? Plus, Finch is not supposed to cozy up with V.2 at the end. He shoots V.1 and leaves ecstatic.
To finish up, here is a list of characters or plot points that I enjoyed in the original, but missed in the film:
- The song and montage in the Prelude to Book 2, The Vicious Cabaret
- The Prologue of Book 3, 1812 Overture and explosion
- The Vox Populi section
- Finch’s hallucinogenic trip at Larkhill and the image of him naked at Stonehenge
- The politics of the different coup attempts
- The look into the mind of the Leader, his heartbreak at the infidelity of Fate and his fall to assassination
- The homeless Guy Fawkes in the tunnel
- Finch walking off on the empty dark highway
