I saw V for Vendetta last night--Huebert is right. It's very good. (See also the positive reviews by Butler Shaffer, Anthony Gregory, Thomas Luongo.) Sure, the movie missteps in some ways; it is a bit too compressed; a bit shaky on some explanations ... but it is trying, trying hard, to seriously do a serious film. Or, as my favorite film critic (next to Mr. Cranky) Mark Kermode might say, it is a "proper film" (in fact, listen to his review here).
As for some of the critics, I must say I don't quit get their quibbles. They seem either trivial (focusing on irrelevant details like how the biological warfare really ahppened, or whether the love story between V and Evey is really convincing), or pettifogging. For example, one Ross Levatter, writing in Liberty, complains that, instead of promoting the anarchist message that violent rebellion is justified even against a normal state, the movie "tries to justify the terrorist actions of V by pointing out that this is a corrupt government, which kills its own citizens". Um. Isn't that enough? Isn't it true that violent opposition to a corrupt government is a good thing? I mean, give me a break. (See also Colin Patrick Barth's critical review on LRC.)
Worse is the reaction by Robert L. Jones, in his review "V for Vapid," in the April 2006 of The New Individualist, a generally very good Objectivist magazine. Jones has some silly complaints--Hugo Weaving's acting is "stiff" (?); V moves too fast for someone who suffered burns over his body; V's "alliterative soliloquy containing forty-seven words beginning with the letter 'V'" sounds like "Snidely Whiplash doing a Jesse Jackson impression" (talk about snide!). He also complains that V has an "abiding and strident narcissism," as when he takes over the British broadcasting network to inform the people that it was he who had bombed the Old Bailey--not some scheduled demolition, as the government lies had stated. Can this really be an Objectivst making this complaint? Narcissism? Um... has anyone read a speech by a Rand character? Anyone remember John Galt taking over the radio networks to preach at them for three hours?
But what really irks Jones is that the movie "fetishizes freedom through its direct advocacy of anarchy". Jones seems upset that V blows up the Old Bailey and Parliament. According to Jones, this act is akin to the terrorist destruction of the World Trade Center and the murderous rampage at Columbine High School. What? Hey, why not throw in Howard Roark's dynamiting of Cortlandt Homes? My jaw dropped when I read this comparison. Here is an Objectivist comparing naked terrorist aggression against innocent victims, to justified attacks on the property of a totalitarian state! The movie makes it clear that V has a strategic purpose in dynamiting these state buildings: for symbolic reasons, to unite the populace and to spur them into action, to help burst the bubble of legitimacy the corrupt state was relying on, and because the state had coopted these symbols of justice and had corrupted them. This is clearly a Randian type of motive and theme.
