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Just, finally, watched V for Vendetta. I should have stopped watching at the very start when they said "by the makers of The Matrix". But then Stephen Fry's name was mentioned, so I watched.
And whilst it wasn't especially true to the comic, I could understand the changes they made - the threats and paranoia in the film were, after all, more likely to resonate with a modern audience than nuclear war.
I could even find it ironic that John Hurt, one time actor of Winston Smith, was no playing big brother - even if at times he seemed to be modelling his character on how he thought Leo McKern might have played it.
I could even forgive being pulled out of the narrative by wondering if Stephen Fry was playing a character in a film, or if the film character had been based on him.
And for most of the film I felt that Alan Moore had been being a bit prima donna-ish really in disassociating his name with it.
And then...
And then someone said "let's make it a bit Matrix-y" and then someone else said "let's make V seem superhuman".
And you got the awful, terrible showdown, with the slow-mo daggers flying, and the twisting and turning and none of V's injuries seeming to affect him (one of my main gripes with Hamlet is how it took him so sodding long to die compared to everyone else), and it just spoilt the whole tone of the film. It went from a modern take on The Count of Monte Cristo, a fact unsubtly made earlier in the film, into something wholly mundane and humdrum.
And then...
And then just as you'd almost got over that (which would have had me launching the remote at teh TV had it not been safely out of harm's way), you have all the people taking their V masks off and revealing, amongst others, characters you know are dead. What sodding point did they think they were making? You don't need resurrections to make the point that words, that ideas don't die. It was unneccesary. It was jarring. It spoilt whatever impact the film had left after it went Matrix-y.
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