V for Vendetta 03/17/06

Oliver Stone was once questioned about the objectivity of his movies. Some claimed that they were even purely propaganda. He replied with this paraphrased insight. "When one is watching a movie, there is a sure fire way of telling whether it's propaganda or not. Propaganda by nature is boring. If my movies were propaganda, why would anyone watch them. They would be boring." Why is propaganda boring? Well to sum it up, in propaganda there are no surprises. One side always wins and one side always loses. There's a mythic structure of us vs. them and the audience never has any doubt who the good guys are, and who the bad guys are supposed to be. In short, in the first five minutes they've seen the entire movie. Someone should tell this to the Wachowski brothers, because their last three movies have been drowning in the abyss of predictability. Throw politics into predictability and out comes propaganda. This movie is two hours of that. 
V, the guy is called, is an anonymity. He's like a comic book creation. He's only one person, but he's shows up everywhere. Bullets don't hurt him. He's wanted in a police state that, by definition, should see everything and yet he get's away with blowing up buildings and setting off fireworks. He wins every battle, easily by the way, and kills many evil men. Who are these evil men. Well they look a hell of a lot like Russian Communists. Lenin comes to mind. They are completely one dimensional with personalities like acid. It should be noted that real-life dictators are actually incredibly sociable people (Castro, Saddam, Stalin). They are like the colorful gangsters you see in the movies. They're great for laughs and in the same day they take a guy outside and shoot him. For once we need bad guys like that. The chancellor in this story has only one emotion and that's anger. The robots in the Matrix were more human. 
There is a police state, but we don't know how it works. It's also unclear how it fails so miserably. There are hardly any details whatsoever. This isn't a great insightful work like "1984." This is a strange collection of all the symbols and motifs that scare the shit out of us today, combined with an avid hatred of current society. This is propaganda.
And it really is a shame too, because I do have doubts about our current society. But I don't believe we live in a time where blowing up buildings will have any effect. The people in this movie seem to believe differently.
I will finally stop with this paraphrased quote from Roger Ebert. He said it in reference to the movie "Death to Smoochy." I will say it here. Only immensely talented people can make a movie this bad. In that it took a hell of a lot of ambition, will, and guts to even get this made, and then alot of skill and good intentions to go as far into the abyss as it did. The Wachowski brothers are talented and deserve to make more movies. They just have to make sure that when they light that three-thousand ton rocket, it's pointed toward the sky not at the ground.