Movie Review: V for Vendetta

Okay, so let the political discussion begin.

Upon watching this film, while I certainly picked up on certain liberal strains (particularly the portrayal of the heinous dictator as a conservative who hated homosexuals) it wasn't until I watched the "making of" that exactly what they wanted to communicate became clearer to me.
However, (and please excuse if this sounds pretentious) what was particularly interesting to me was that I do not think it was simply because I "missed" the point. That I was too dull to catch the political sting they were going for. No, what I believe it was was simply a fundamental difference in ideology, such that my interpretation of the film was certainly far removed from theirs. Here's what I mean.

As I viewed it, V for Vendetta was a movie about a world in which a totalitarian dictatorship had taken over supreme political power in the world, and was utilizing heinously immoral fear tactics to assert its power. Because of this, the world has now sold themselves over to such unforgiving, corrupt leadership because they're willing to trade the peace they now have in their lives for the unthinkable acts being done behind the scenes. This being the setting, "V" then comes in as a variable ideological purist who seeks to reinstate the true virtues of human liberty into the system. Of course, since the system has been so thoroughly militarized, the only way he can do this is through violent force: through vigilante justice. Ultimately, he succeeds in reinstating a sense of humanity to the world by killing the main power figures over the corrupt government, and destroying the ultimate "symbol" of their power, parliament. That is of course a simplified version of it, with the other primary detail to be mentioned that, in the end, his quest for justice takes his life as well (his justice is also personal vengeance, but that's a whole other side of the story which does pertain, but merely fits into the overall themes of what I just stated) Anyways, in short, when I saw V for Vendetta I saw a man willing to step into a variable modern day Third Reich and do what it took to reinstate a sense of liberty to the communal human spirit.

Here's what the directors, apparently, wanted us to see:

For one, I will say that throughout the movie, I got the sense that they were trying to compare the oppressive dictatorship in the movie to the modern day US government. However, I sensed that they were still leaving their movie up to various interpretations. Apparently, in the directors' eyes, this is not what they wanted. As I listened to them discuss the "political message" of the movie, all they talked about was how V was a terrorist who stood for good while the government was fundamentally flawed and corrupt. And then Hugo Weaving (who played V) made a comment to the effect of "it makes you think about terrorists today, and how maybe we should try and understand them better." So basically, I caught the pretty clear vibe that the movie was trying to convey this idea that modern day conservatism is far too misunderstanding, and that if we continue in that direction, we might utterly crush human expression and essentially need a "terrorist" to set us aright. Now while this was extreme, I suppose what really got me was that they actually wanted to postulate this idea that V's character might in some ideological way manifest the modern day terrorist threat. That our aversion to contemporary terrorists, that our modes of precaution that are in some way "fear" based, are in some way unjustified because their message may truly be what we need in order to deliver us from our overt McArthianism and bring us back to a fully liberated psyche. Wow, just....wow. Now, I'm not saying that they came out and SAID this, but when Hugo Weaving says something like I mentioned earlier, the fact that they would even hope for our thinking to be turned in that direction from this movie is just ludicrous to me.

Which brings me to my full opinion on the issue:
A liberal takes this movie and tries to use it as a means to becry the crimes of governmental power and oppression. They point out the flaws in a conservative mindset and show how the whole world can literally go to hell in a firey flamebasket of fear: that intolerance is an insidious thing that will breed and mulitiply until our world is entirely overrun by a closeminded, unforgiving regime.

However, I have one overriding difficulty with this: is not the liberal platform the one that espouses greater governmental power and control? Yes, I know I am a conservative, but I'm farily sure that anyone educated at all in the differences between the conservative and liberal approach to politics and particularly economy would know that the conservative is more about the individual, and the liberal about the system. The conservative wants to get as close to true capitalism as possible, while the liberal wants to push more towards socialism, with an economy controlled by government related taxes. The conservative wants bigger businesses to employ more people; the liberal want to take that money from those businesses, put it in the hands of the government, and spread it how it sees fit (typically to help those who won't help themselves: different topic for a different day, though.) Anyway, this being considered, I thought it pretty logically inconsistent that the liberal agenda in this movie would be to criticize the conservative mindset as the one more akin to governmental regulation; when nearly anyone with any knowledge of the difference betweent these two thought camps would know that it's precisely the oppoite.

But ultimately, I could probably go on about that forever. So I'm going to let that suffice for now :-)