As a cinematic experience, the movie has much to commend it. Some critical observations about staccato verbosity, particularly at the outset, are not undeserved. For an adaption of the earlier 1980s comic piece it actually holds up quite well. Fanboy churlishness aside. The original's anarchist view (the V and the 1980s “A” for anarchy not accidentally similar) is and was self indulgently childish — especially when the reality Moore railed against is now so much more immediate than his overcooked imaginings just twenty years ago.

Does Evey suffer by transposition from streetwalker to tv newser naif? Not in our eyes. We give it four Leos out of five.

See it for yourself and make your own judgments. And btw, in 1969 that night at Madison Square Garden, the Stones really could lay claim to being possibly the best rock n roll band in the world. That night.

UPDATE: (revised 4:15 PM — clarifies some initial confusion on our part upon reading the original comment on GP's site over reaction to V)

Global Paradigms offers a summary of reactions. In the interest of preventing confusion, the comment about Moore above is based on having read (and enjoyed) the actual comic years ago. The comic and screenplay are not the same. It is a mistake to conflate the two. That the comic was written as commentary to Thatcherite Britain is widely known. It's call to anarchy in the U.K. (cue in Malcolm McLaren) then using the pretext of the fascist dictatorship in the comic was a bit childish, much like the incoherent politics of Joe Strummer and the Clash of that era.

Even in Bakunin-esque terms, the comic was . . . well a comic.

A reason the movie is superior to Moore's comic in our opinion is precisely because the Wachowski brothers moved subtly beyond Moore's over simplicities. In doing so, they gave V's gift of death and defiance resonance by depicting (even if indirectly) the positive possibilities opened. A clear subtext in the movie are the political implications of memory. The screenplay suggests that collective memory offers the possibility of restoration — of liberal democracy. But the movie was faithful to the comic in this respect — the Wachowskis were careful to leave open the possibilities on a positively ambiguous trajectory. A positive political trajectory is all the more important because, as noted above, the realities of Moore's notional fascism of the 1980s are actually unfolding around us now.