Movie: V for Vendetta

Ignoring my better judgement, I headed out to see a movie on opening weekend with Liz and Crabby. I suppose if you're going to see one movie in the theater, better make it a good one. I've been waiting for V ever since it was announced, and the final product nearly filled my every expectation.

Since the movie has a great PR push behind it, I'm not going to bother too much with summarizing the plot. It certainly sets out what it accomplishes to do: while you may not neccessarily sympathize with V the terrorist, the film explores what goes into the kinds of things that could push someone to commit such extreme acts. One man's terrorist is another man's revolutionary, and that concept is the centerpoint of the film.

It captured the spirit of the graphic novel extremely well, if not the exact letter of it. Some things were changed and updated for a more modern audience, and I suspect that a couple of changes were made (Evey not being a prostitute, for example) to make the movie more palatable to the popcorn audience. I'm not for a minute going to turn into a Faithful Adaptation Snob and cry and complain about "how could they have screwed that up!" Rather, I'm going to take comfort in the fact that by making the movie appeal to a wider audience, perhaps more people will be exposed to the film's far more important ideas - and might even start to think about them.

While I didn't leave the theater with that sought-after tingle of "damn, I want to see that again!", at least I felt satisfied.