I watched V for Vendetta at the behest of my freshmen and found it not too bad. At least it warns us of some of the excesses of government, and the fact that it was originally a comic book really blows my mind. Young people read comic books and that genre of literature is really improving as evidenced by this movie.
My freshman students told me I would like V for Vendetta which I seriously doubted because it is from a comic book, for heavens sake! But I did like it. It's a revolutionary movie aimed at young people. It shows them the downside of dictatorship and even explains how the government managed to create dictatorship through fear. The premise seems rather farfetched -- that the government deliberately poisoned a goodly amount of the population in order to gain power through fear, and that V is taking personal revenge. But I've been discussing using fear as a political instrument in my classes, and they seem to be getting it. The movie is sort of a cross between Phantom of the Opera and The Matrix which is not surprising since the Wachowski brothers wrote the screenplay. I do appreciate writers and movie producers who bring up these ideas in movies because most of my students are far more interested in movies than in essays about these same problems. This is not the most sophisticated movie I've ever seen, but it gets a message across to young folks which they need to understand. Most dictatorships rely on young people to be the robotic minions of the dictator, and this movie warns them against that. Also I think I'll go buy a gun just in case. I don't like the way the government is moving at the moment and can only hope that the Democrats do succeed in taking the House and Senate, or at least the House. Otherwise, I'm moving to another country. I'm a professor and professors tend to end up before the firing squads. I think this is a movie, albeit based on a comic book, that might bear watching.