CHUD’s V for Vendetta Editorial

V for Vendetta is one of the films that I’ve been looking forward to the most this year. Not just because it looks like a solid action film, but it looks like a solid “thinking man“ ‘s action film, one where both the fists and ideas fly. Even though the graphic novel on which the film is based originally came out in the early 1980s, the themes of the story could be scarily applicable to our world today.

Sure, terrorism plays a major role in the story — the main character is a terrorist, after all — but the story’s world, where a totalitarian government curbs personal liberties in the name of all-important security, where people are arrested and held without any real reason, where folks are carted off to concentration camps because of their race, sexual tendencies, etc., where revered religious leaders are corrupted by political affiliations… well, in my more cynical moments, it all feels a little prescient.

CHUD’s recent V for Vendetta article isn’t actually a review of the film, but rather an editorial on why it’s the “most dangerous film of 2006”, and it’s just the latest in a string of articles that have me very intrigued and yes, even excited to see the film.

It’s shocking that a film like V For Vendetta, in which the hero can be described in no other terms but terrorist, has been made by a major movie studio, which is itself a part of a major, world-dominating corporation. Either the folks at Warner Bros and Time-Warner weren’t paying a lot of attention or they just don’t think that a movie will make any bit of difference at this point. I couldn’t disagree more, and I have to tell you that if I was still actively working as a political organizer I would be standing outside theaters showing V and handing out anti-Bush and anti-Iraq War pamphlets to exiting moviegoers. Sure, this film is about a fictional fascist state that denies its people basic liberties and makes them live in fear, and sure it’s set in the London of the future, but there’s no hiding the fact that the film’s timeline is one that begins today.

V for Vendetta opens March 17, 2006. Until then, watch the trailers, and even more importantly, read the graphic novel. It’s a simply stunning piece of work.