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Saturday, July 23, 2005

V for Vendetta trailer hits the net

No, this ain't a big-screen movie about the man-eating alien lizards that NBC shocked us with back in the mid-80s...

I will be there opening day to see this, even if I can barely explain it to anyone else I know. I borrowed this graphic novel from a friend in college about ten years ago. It's... interesting, to put it mildly. V for Vendetta by Alan Moore is something like "George Orwell's 1984 meets Batman meets Moore's Watchmen meets Guy Fawkes meets Terry Gilliam's Brazil", if any of that makes sense at all...
In brief: the graphic novel was set in an alternate-history Great Britain where a Nazi-ish regime came to power. Mysterious and masked V runs around doing neat things like killing those in power and sabotaging government-run broadcasting, all in a bid to sow chaos and let anarchy reign supreme. Being an Alan Moore work, it naturally became a comic book classic... in addition to being a thought-provoking commentary on totalitarianism and creeping fascism.

And, it looks like in the hands of the Wachowski Brothers, this movie is going to nail the comic pretty darned close (which doesn't happen much with an Alan Moore adaptation). I don't really know too much about this to be honest but just going by the trailer it looks like they're edging away from the "almost-happened" reality and putting this into the realm of our possible future. This might be a perfect movie for our times, as evidenced by this quote from the trailer...

"People should not be afraid of their government. Government should be afraid of their people."
Well worth checking out the trailer and not just because of Natalie Portman's dead-on impersonation of Sigourney Weaver in Alien 3 either. There's also this curious lil' visual...
That's John Hurt looking EXACTLY like that tele-screened image of Big Brother from that movie version of 1984 (the one with the songs by Annie Lennox and Eurythmics) that Hurt was in over twenty years ago! I saw this and laughed so hard I almost spewed Coke all over the monitor. That's just gotta be intentional humor on the part of the Wachowskis. Anyhoo, mash down here for the V for Vendetta trailer and watch shaven-head Natalie Portman and the guy who played Agent Smith lead a violent upheaval against tyranny and oppression.

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