Campfyre Stories

Although I had resigned myself to not actually seeing V for Vendetta in the theaters, finally there was someone who wanted to see it with me.  Right up until the last minute I was convinced I was going to have to rent it, but we wound up catching it just in time before it left the theater.

And boy did that movie piss me off.  I had read the original comic books (really original, not the graphic novel compilation) only a few months ago, borrowing them from Dragonmaker.  i was really impressed (and continue to be) with Alan Moore’s work.  I had heard that he removed his name from the Wachowski Brothers movie, but after hearing mixed, but mostly decent reviews, I was keeping an open mind.

But I don’t think that even having waited to read the comics until after would have helped, which was what I assumed would be the case.

I went to see the movie with a friend of mine who hadn’t read the comics and isn’t really at all familiar with comics in general.  He was just looking for a good action movie with some compelling swordplay.  From the beginning I wondered how much of what was going on he actually *got*, since the head, voice, eyes, ears and fingers were not really explained.  As the movie went on I felt more and more that it was geared at people who had read the comics, simply because key plot points like the interment and essentially genocide were not being explained, or even addressed in more than just a passing way.

However, if it was geared at those who read the original story, why change things that didn’t serve to further the plot?  When we first meet Evey in the comics, she’s unemployed and out, breaking curfew as she prepares to turn her first trick, in an attempt to make money hooking.  Giving her a job was unnecessary.  In the comics, Gordon became her lover, so his loss was much harder to deal with.  And the ending…  *shakes head*  All the morals could have just as easily been conveyed by using the actual ending, rather than completely changing things.

What happened was, was that my friend left the theater confused and I was rather angry at the reality of what they did.  The omissions were done well, had they left everything in the movie, it would have been about 6 hours long, as it stands it was already 2:12, but the superfluous changes made me feel like they were trying to improve on this Vertigo classic, and they didn’t, nor did they need to.

Buy the graphic novel, or borrow it from a friend.  Hell, borrow it from me, since that’s my next literary purchase, but whether you’ve read it before or not, the movie totally isn’t worth seeing…  and if you already read it, it’ll probably just piss you off.

I may have to write a sharp note on this one.