On Second Thought, Forget the 5th of November

Now, let me get it out of the way before I say the rest of this: I’m not one of those people who requires a “faithful” comic-to-movie adaptation and I don’t worship Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta. I read it maybe five years ago, remember thinking it was very good, but haven’t opened it since.

So, I just want to establish that.

All that said, the just-released trailer for the Wachowski brothers’ V for Vendetta really does not look very good.

Natalie Portman looks cute, of course (at least in the scenes in which she has hair), but otherwise this looks bad. The thing looks like it was shot on a set, not in real life, the V mask looks silly, andd the whole thing just screams of the same entirely-missing-it vibe of the old Watchmen script (that can be found online) that featured such winning lines like “Christ! It’s the goddamned Watchmen!”

I mean, the thing is being advertised as “an uncompromising vision of the future.” So uncompromising, that is, that they’ve changed the premise and eviscerated the central political point Alan Moore was making about the possible rise of fascism through democracy.

As always, we shouldn’t judge a film before folks have had the chance to see it, but having seen this trailer, I’m not sure I’ll be one of those folks.