Release Date: March 17, 2006

Cast: Natalie Portman, Hugo Weaving, Stephen Rea, John Hurt

(out of 4)

By Sean Chavel

The Wachowski Brothers, creators of "The Matrix" films, were going to make "V for Vendetta" their highly anticipated follow-up film. They wrote the adapted screenplay based on the graphic comic book novel by Alan Moore. The text is an allegory on a futuristic, and eerily plausible, fascist society that owes deeply to "1984" and "A Clockwork Orange." The exhausted Wachowski Brothers handed over directing duties to James McTeigue, a first-time director who served as an assistant director on the Matrix films.

The result is powerful and intriguing, offering up much more ideology than your typical action film. The story is still occupied by conventional relationships. Such as the inevitable friendship between Evey (Natalie Portman) and revolutionary hero V (Hugo Weaving) who hides behind a mask the entire film.

In futuristic England, the people surrender themselves to a fascist government that suggests many fascist governments from all over the world of the past century. England is a police state, with big cinematic images utilized to suggest the fear of the people and the oppression within the land.

The most disturbing, and effective footage that exists within the film are the flashback scenes where V is an unwilling human guinea pig for a government experiment. Many of the captives are infected with a terminal virus, and the media paints the story as a plague with unknown origins. The footage is so strong, and slated with sadism, that possibly it was cut back to avoid offending certain audiences, or to avoid an NC-17 rating. As is, the footage is skimmed to the bone but still potent stuff.

John Hurt is Chancellor Sutler, who rose to power the same way Adolph Hitler did, by using object iconography to win the approval of the masses. There are Big Brother moments from 1984, in the way he uses omnipotent televisions to speak down to the public or to his officials in his cabinet. His trenchant, possessed face always seen through a big television screen. In the last screen adaptation of George Orwell’s "1984," Hurt appeared as the little man caught illegally expressing love, consequently captured and beaten down by the system. This time he plays the tyrant.

The film raises issues of persecuted groups, particularly the attack on homosexuals who routinely find themselves imprisoned because of their nature. More pressingly, there are the issues of the government’s suppression of its people. Citizens routinely are obliged to uphold a curfew system. The news is filtered with government propaganda. It is illegal to speak out against the chancellor.

No one fights for freedom until V steps in to lead a revolt against the government. V is an intellectual man who knows every adjective in the letter V to describe himself, he reads censored books and collects historic artifacts, he is righteously a man of principles who uses violence, he says, as a justifiable answer to rebel against the government. Evey argues with him that violence is the precipitator to more violence. There are plenty of arguments and action scenes throughout the film that challenge V and Evey’s viewpoints.

The film is leading up to a date of November the 5th – a date in which V promises the citizens that he is going to blow up the Parliament. V asks that the people rise and march towards the government. The film satisfies by giving us sensational images of the people revolting, with V, transforming into mysterious stranger to heroic superhero before our eyes, and then blasting us with unforeseen dramatic surprises. V is more or less than we imagined him to be underneath the costume.

Stephen Rea ("The Crying Game") co-stars as a detective on the trail of V, a Guy Montag-like character from Ray Bradbury’s watershed novel "Fahrenheit 451" who undergoes changes in faith during his pursuit of the truth. So you got the infused ideas of sci-fi writers like Bradbury and Orwell meshed into one remarkable hybrid of a film, something that suggests comic book hero genre meets sci-fi Big Brother genre. (Plus I think there is some underlying references to Terry Gilliam’s "Brazil" and the literary works of Aldous Huxley somewhere in there, too.)