I hadn't heard many good things written about this movie when it came out but I finally decided to watch it on Sky Movies recently. I was very pleasantly surprised to find an interesting, exciting, well written movie which made up for the horror of the second two Matrix movies.
Basic plot is a dystopian near future where UK is a fascist state run by a dictator (John Hurt) and his secret police.
V is an anarchist/terrorist who blows up the Old Bailey, hacks into the emergency comms system and tells everyone to turn up at the houses of parliament in one years time to take power back for the people.
V spends the movie in a Guy Fawkes mask and it is testament to Hugo Weaver that his voice is rich enough to pull this off.
Natalie Portman gets sucked into his world but has a less extreme vision than him.
Lots of stuff about viruses, germ warfare, experiments on undesirables etc. Pretty standard fare for any dystopian movie.
The plot rollicks along with lots of depth. The colour schemes work extremely well.
Alls well that ends well and the nasty dictator is toppled but V dies in the process.
My main gripe with the movie is that dystopian futures in books/movies are always run by fascists whereas, apart from Hitler, all recent dystopian pasts have been run by communists. I read up on the graphic novel on which the movie was based to discover that it was written in the early 80's and the author thought Maggie Thatcher would lead the UK to a world like V's. What a numbskull.
