Tagline of the Week: Courtesy of V for Vendetta

Hard to believe there’s yet another Alan Moore adaptation racing down the pipeline, faster than you can say “don’t ruin another comi---“.

(On a brief aside, I sat down the other night and watched From Hell, and BOY, is it AWFUL!)

V for Vendetta will be released this fall in early November, and the trailer just hit the Apple Trailers site the other day.

Can’t say I’ve read this particular Moore comic, but I’m definitely intrigued by the concept of a sort of alternate reality where the Nazis won World War II, and Britain is a facist state. Seems similar to the Phillip Roth book that came out earlier this year, The Plot Against America, which also deals with what might have been if Hitler had succeeded in his chilling final solution.

If you can bare squinting your eyes for the unbearably tiny window that Apple provides, you can make out there’s more than a modicum of visual style from first time director James McTeigue. McTeigue has an impressive resume as an assistant director, having worked on all three Matrix films, and Star Wars Episodes II and III. Not too shabby to say the least.

Of course we all know, that just cause something looks pretty, doesn’t mean that it’s fun to sit through. Natalie Portman being the notoriously consummate actress she is, I’m sure will bring her borderline annoying vulnerability to the lead role of Evey Hammond, a young woman who becomes embroiled in political intrigue, and joins a group of facist fighters. I just hope she plays the character older than a fifteen year old, which is how she plays most things If you ask me Portman still lives off the fat of her “amazing” performance in The Professional, despite the fact that that was eleven years ago. I do feel like Portman generally puts in a good effort though, regardless of the end result, so I must take my hat off to her for that. I must give her “props” for shaving her head for the filming of V for Vendetta, an artistic choice that I feel like many young, pretty actresses in this day and age would shun.

As far as the trailer itself goes, its pretty confusing as to what the hell is going on the film. If it weren’t for Yahoo! Movies , handy dandy little summary of the film, I don’t know if I’d have a clue as to what is going on. I did not get a clear sense of the Nazi success plot at all, and while the English accents that everyone has cues us a bit to the location, it isn’t clear what the setting of the film is. This is actually one of the few trailers that comes to mind that I think could benefit from either the “In a World” narration guy, or some more title cards to establish what’s going on. Right now, all we can make out is that Portman’s character kidnapped and then they want her to track someone down, who I’m assuming is the masked crusader with the funny joker like mask. The climate of the film is fairly well established – a crazy totalitarian state, but the specifics of the plot are fairly vague and unclear. Fine by me really, I think they reveal far to much in the trailers these days.

Now the boys over at Aint It Cool posted someone’s review of the script for V for Vendetta, and to quote AICN, it “wasn’t too pretty”. Subsequent commentary from the nerd patrol over there revealed that everyone who had come into some sort of contact with the script didn’t have very good things to say about it. I only skimmed it because of the many spoilers it contained, but among their gripes was the fact that (surprise, surprise) it wasn’t very faithful to the original comic, and that generally the characters and plot were developed poorly. Now the Wachowski brothers wrote this script, and I think that bodes well, because no matter what anyone says, I think everything they’ve put out has ranged from amazing(Matrix) to decent (Matrix Revolutions). Still, there’s a first time for everything. There’s a part of me that wonders why they didn’t go ahead and direct it…

I have to say, after looking at the one sheet for the film, I am quite intrigued by the image of the mask for codename: V. It kind of looks a bit like Timothy Dalton, don’t you think? (Timothy Dalton, only way, way creepier.)



Oh yeah, and the tagline for this one reads:

“Remember, Remember, the fifth of November.”

While I knew it sounded familiar, it wasn’t until I looked up the phrase on trusty google, that I realized where it is from. The phrase was taken out of a British sermon that was written to commemorate a heinous crime of treason in 1605, where a man was caught in the basement of Parliament with barrels of gunpowder trying to blow it up.

I like the fact that the Wachowskis got a little historical.