Coming to Blu-ray this coming week the highly anticipated Sci-Fi thriller ‘V for Vendetta’! The movie has already been released on HD-DVD last year but this will be a first on Blu-ray. This is a movie that I really liked even though I never had the pleasure of reading the comic book before the movie. The Blu-ray will have have nice features and extras! It will include also more languages that you will ever need…

V for Vendetta starts off with a prologue to explain the relevance of the Guy Fawkes mask worn by V throughout the film and the significance of the date of the 5th of November. This is for the benefit of audiences who didn’t grow up in the UK and have no idea of who Guy Fawkes was and what his Gunpowder Plot was all about. The sequence is short but informative. From then on we move on to the start of the main story and here the film adheres close enough to the source material with a few changes to the Evey character but not enough to ruin the character. Caught after curfew and accosted by the ruling government’s secret police called Fingermen, Evey soon encounters V who saves her not just from imprisonment but rape.

Right from the start the one thing McTeigue and The Wachowski Brothers got dead-on was casting Hugo Weaving as the title character. Voice silky, velvety and sonorous, Weaving infuses V with an otherworldly, theatrical personality. Whether V was speaking phrases from Shakespeare, philosophers or pop culture icons, the voice gave a character who doesn’t show his face from behind the eternally-smiling Guy Fawkes mask real life. Once V and Evey are thrown in together by the happenstance of that nightly encounter their fates became intertwined. Natalie Portman plays the reluctant witness to V’s acts of terrorism, murders and destruction in the beginning, but a poignant and emotionally powerful sequence to start the second half of the film soon brings Evey’s character not much towards V’s way of doing things, but to understanding just why he’s doing them. This sequence became the emotional punch of the whole film and is literally lifted word for word from the graphic novel. I heard more than just a few people sobbing in the theater as the scenes and story unfolded.

The rest of the cast seemed like a who’s who of the British acting community. From Stephen Rea’s stubborn and dogged Chief Inspector Finch whose quest to find V leads him to finding clues about his government’s past actions that he’d rather have not found. Then there’s Stephen Fry’s flamboyant TV show host who becomes Evey’s only other ally whose secret longings have been forbidden by the government, but who’s awakened by V’s actions to go through with his own form of rebellion. Then there’s John Hurt as High Chancellor Adam Sutler who’s seen chewing up the scenery with his Hitler-like performance through Big Brother video conferences (an ironic bit of casting since John Hurt also played Winston Smith in the film adaptation of the Orwell classic 1984). I really couldn’t find any of the supporting players as having done a bad job in their performances. Even Hurt’s Sutler may seemed over-the-top to some but his performance just showed how much of a hatemonger Sutler and in the end his Norsefire party really were in order to stay in power.

The story itself,had some changes made to it. Some of these changes angered Moore and probably anger his more die-hard fans. They trimmed some of the side stories and tertiary characters from the story and concentrated on V, Evey and Inspector Finch’s pursuit of both and the truth. This adaptation is much closer to how Peter Jackson adapted The Lord of the Rings. But then Moore is also an avowed perfectionist and only a perfect adaptation would do.

Another thing about V for Vendetta that will surely talked about a lot will be the images used in the film. Not just images and symbols looking so much like Nazi icons, but images from the current events sweeping the globe that has been shown time and time again in the news and written about in magazines and newspapers. The film shows people bound and hooded like prisoners from Abu Ghraib. The reason of the war on terror used time and time again by Sutler to justify why England and its people need him and his group to protect them by any means necessary. V for Vendetta seems like a timely film for our current times. Even with the conclusion of the film finally accomplishing what Guy Fawkes failed to do that night of November 5th some 400 plus years ago, V for Vendetta doesn’t give all the answers to all the questions it raises. For some I’m sure this would be something that’ll frustrate them. So much of people who go to watch thought-provoking films want their questions answered as clearly as possible and all of them. V for Vendetta doesn’t answer them but gives the audience enough information to try and work it out themselves.

It is a film that is sure to polarize the extreme left and right of the political pundits and commentators. But as a piece of thought-provoking and even as a politically subversive film, V for Vendetta does it job well. It is not a perfect film by any respect, but the story and message it tries to convey in addition to its value as a piece of entertainment mor than makes up for its flaws. V for Vendetta more than continues the current crop of seriously done comic book fillm adaptations (Batman Begins, X2, Sin City, and A History of Violence) but it also shows that Alan Moore’s work can be adapted well to the screen when given to the right people. It may not be perfect and it may not make Alan Moore happy, but it comes close.

Synopsis

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-death situation by a masked man (Hugo Weaving) known only as “V.” Incomparably charismatic and ferociously skilled in the art of combat and deception, V ignites a revolution when he urges his fellow citizens to rise up against tyranny and oppression. As Evey uncovers the truth about V’s mysterious background, she also discovers the truth about herself - and emerges as his unlikely ally in the culmination of his plan to bring freedom and justice back to a society fraught with cruelty and corruption.

Watch the trailer here!

Specs

Bonus View (Profile 1.1)

Video Resolution/Codec

• 1080p/VC-1
• 480p/i/MPEG-2 (Supplements Only)

Aspect Ratio(s)

• 2.40:1

Audio Formats

• English Dolby TrueHD 5.1 Surround (48kHz/16-bit)
• English Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround (640kbps)
• French (Parisian) Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround (640kbps)
• French (Quebec) Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround (640kbps)
• Spanish Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround (640kbps)
• German Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround (640kbps)
• Italian Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround (640kbps)
• Japanese Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround (640kbps)

Subtitles/Captions

• English Subtitles
• Dutch Subtitles
• Finnish Subtitles
• Norwegian Subtitles
• Portuguese Subtitles
• French Subtitles
• Spanish Subtitles
• German Subtitles
• Italian Subtitles
• Japanese Subtitles
• Danish Subtitles

Supplements

• Featurettes
• Short Film
• Theatrical Trailer

Exclusive HD Content

• Picture-in-Picture

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