Set against the futuristic landscape of totalitarian Britain, V for Vendetta tells the story of a mild-mannered young woman named Evey (Natalie Portman) who is rescued from a life-and.
'Remember, remember the fifth of November, the Gunpowder Treason and plot,' a voiceover intones at the opening of V for Vendetta. 'I know of no reason why the Gunpowder Treason should ever be forgot.' The popular British rhyme--which the film generously repeats again less than ten minutes later for those stuck in the concession line the first time around--refers, of course, to Guy Fawkes's unsuccessful plot to blow up the British Parliament in 1605. Though Fawkes and his radical Catholic co-conspirators managed to smuggle eighteen hundred pounds of gunpowder into a cellar beneath Parliament, they were caught before bringing their plan to fruition, and were subsequently tried and executed. Guy Fawkes Day and its attendant conventions--the grinning Fawkes masks, the burning in effigy of a Fawkes dummy--are celebrations not of the plot, but of its failure. (Indeed, subsequent verses of the 'Fifth of November' include some choice words for the Pope.)
When writer Alan Moore chose Guy Fawkes as a model for 'V,' the masked antihero of his dystopian 1980s comic book 'V for Vendetta,' he obviously understood this context. Though V is trying to topple a fascist regime (based on Moore's decidedly paranoid view of Thatcherism), he is himself an ambiguous figure, an anarchistic force of pure destruction who is quite possibly insane. The first sign of trouble with the $50 million film adaptation of Moore's story (written by the Wachowski brothers of Matrix fame, and directed by their protege James McTiegue) is the brief but peculiar introduction of Fawkes, a religious extremist and terrorist, as a heroic martyr. It is an early taste of how V will be presented--also a terrorist, also a hero--and of the moral and political idiocies to come.