England prevails
(spoilers ahoy, if you care; if you liked the movie and would like some sense of how different the book is, this timeline will give you an idea)
V For Vendetta is one of my favourite books, full stop.
I was really worried about the movie, mostly for reasons mentioned below, but also just generally for how well they would adapt it. Well, it wasn't perfect (too many lumps of exposition, and a few bad changes) but it is awfully good. The most powerful part of the book to me is the prison/Valerie sequence and its aftermath, and the film does it surprisingly well (I don't mind admitting I got a bit teary around the time of "But for three years I had roses and did not apologize to anyone" - the letter is changed from the original, but it's still very powerful), although it goes off the rails a bit at afterwards.
Most of the changes made are to the background and allow the film to work as a film, and quite successfully; I can understand why Moore didn't want his name on it, but it's the closest thing to a great adaptation of his work we've yet seen. It, and V, are just as politically problematic as the book were, but thanks to the introduction of a bit of romance between V and Evey (easily the worst change) things are a bit off; I still hear a lot of echoes of Heiner Müller's Mauser (downloadable here, after a fashion), which I read and wrote about in second year and which had a huge impact on me, in V's choice of ending and the wisdom thereof. Note that the description I linked to says "As for the new man, we will never see his face." But Joy (who hasn't read the original) notes that thanks to the romance subtext V's choice can (and should, I'd argue) be viewed not in this sort of political/social light, but in an emotional one - at which point it becomes an act of cowardice.
That notwithstanding, there are plenty of wonderful moments (including a small host not in the comic - wait for Stephen Fry's TV show, it's brilliant), including two that will stick in my mind for quite a while; a montage centred around V's love of dominoes, and also Inspector Finch's LSD trip - the drug isn't mentioned at all in the movie, but the "vision" he recounts (which is presented perfectly - it's a very Grant Morrison moment, or maybe it's better to say it's a distillation of what Morrison took from Moore's work) is clearly the same as that part of the book. The movie is less English, less bleak, less literary; more obvious, more clear-cut, more direct. It is still powerful and worth seeing.
V For Vendetta is one of my favourite books, full stop.
I was really worried about the movie, mostly for reasons mentioned below, but also just generally for how well they would adapt it. Well, it wasn't perfect (too many lumps of exposition, and a few bad changes) but it is awfully good. The most powerful part of the book to me is the prison/Valerie sequence and its aftermath, and the film does it surprisingly well (I don't mind admitting I got a bit teary around the time of "But for three years I had roses and did not apologize to anyone" - the letter is changed from the original, but it's still very powerful), although it goes off the rails a bit at afterwards.
Most of the changes made are to the background and allow the film to work as a film, and quite successfully; I can understand why Moore didn't want his name on it, but it's the closest thing to a great adaptation of his work we've yet seen. It, and V, are just as politically problematic as the book were, but thanks to the introduction of a bit of romance between V and Evey (easily the worst change) things are a bit off; I still hear a lot of echoes of Heiner Müller's Mauser (downloadable here, after a fashion), which I read and wrote about in second year and which had a huge impact on me, in V's choice of ending and the wisdom thereof. Note that the description I linked to says "As for the new man, we will never see his face." But Joy (who hasn't read the original) notes that thanks to the romance subtext V's choice can (and should, I'd argue) be viewed not in this sort of political/social light, but in an emotional one - at which point it becomes an act of cowardice.
That notwithstanding, there are plenty of wonderful moments (including a small host not in the comic - wait for Stephen Fry's TV show, it's brilliant), including two that will stick in my mind for quite a while; a montage centred around V's love of dominoes, and also Inspector Finch's LSD trip - the drug isn't mentioned at all in the movie, but the "vision" he recounts (which is presented perfectly - it's a very Grant Morrison moment, or maybe it's better to say it's a distillation of what Morrison took from Moore's work) is clearly the same as that part of the book. The movie is less English, less bleak, less literary; more obvious, more clear-cut, more direct. It is still powerful and worth seeing.
