V for Vendetta

[thermalsatsuma]

I first read V for Vendetta in the original Warrior comics, some twenty five years ago now. A dystopian fascist Britain in the near future, drawn in a stunning chiaroscuro style by David Lloyd, it impressed me with Alan Moore's hijacking of the Guy Fawkes iconography to tell a story of a masked terrorist. There were some fantastic innovations in the way the story was told, including episodes with no dialogue or exposition, and a musical episode with an accompanying flexi disc record. It took a while to wrap things up after the demise of Warrior, but the ending was satisfying and appropriate.

I finally got around to watching the DVD of the film version last night, and my considered reaction can be summed up as - meh. Parts of it were excellent, with some of the best scenes being lifted from the original designs, but there are some significant faults with it. Some significant characters and subplots have been dropped, the story drags badly in places and there is a clunking info dump at one point. I was disappointed that the scenes if the Kit Kat Klub didn't make it onto screen, if only to hear somebody singing the line "I'll grab with mad abandon, any lad with an armband on!" in the Cabaret pastiche.

Still, any film that ends with the Houses of Parliament being blown up counts as a happy ending in my books ...