Today, the Fifth of November, is the perfect day for V for Vendetta. To be sure, Guy Fawkes Day finds a reference or two in a story about an anarchist in a Guy Fawkes mask. Go figure. He even intones as much: Remember, remember, the Fifth of November. But it’s this particular 11/5, the one here in 2017, that’s a perfect day for V. Because we’re now coming up on a year (!) since the presidential election of 2016, an entire year of what this masked anarchist, vested with a vast and verbose vocabulary, would call vitriol, venom, vilification, violence.
Maybe you’re on the other side of this screen saying sheesh — I came here for a movie, not a political rant, or some variation on that oft-repeated question Do you have to politicize everything? To be fair, our primary focus throughout this Alan Moore Writer Series has been the differences from the page to the screen in adaptations like From Hell and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen; V for Vendetta, adapted by the Wachowski siblings from Moore’s 1988/89 comic, is no exception in that it contains fairly sharp divergences from the source material. The last act of V and entire characters like Leader Adam Susan are either condensed, excised entirely, or changed to better suit the unique needs of a big-budget Hollywood production.
Motion State Review 