Remember, remember

"Excuse me. There seems to be some sort of mistake. I bought a drink and some popcorn and now I have no money."
— Black Books, series 1, ep. 5

Tonight, I went to the cinema. But, heeding the warnings implicit in Bernard's bewilderment above, I took my own popcorn, freshly made. It's so much cheaper. Alas, it seemed a petty act of rebellion next to the explosives on screen.

We saw V For Vendetta, the latest comicbook-made-film from Hollywood. I've read the comic, but I won't pretend to be a superior geek — I read it when I heard they were making a film about a British Orwellian dystopia with an anarchist hero of sorts. My cup of tea, I thought. And it was: Alan Moore's comic is a brilliant work, and I know its not only those of us with a soft spot for anarchism and a crush on George Orwell who appreciated it — my girlfriend loved it too.

After Sin City, I had high hopes of how a comicbook film could look, and with the Wachowskis scriptwriting, expectations were higher still. Those hopes have not been dashed: The comic is, to oversimplify, "a blend of 1984 and Batman", and the film takes that and builds on it, sticking to the comic's imagery, making the story "relevant" and, well, just making that story.

As with any adaptation, it's not a question of whether it's been changed or how much, but simply how. I expected not to have quite as much Shakespearean monologue or deeper philosophical explanation from V; I was even braced for a bit of sexualisation of the characters, perhaps a broadening of the relationship between V and Evey. Thankfully, the imagery and the relationships between characters didn't stray far from those of the graphic novel, making for an impressive identification of the two: in my mind, the train scene near the end plays out in the frames just as it does in the panels.

As well as the Shakespeare quotes, which were integral to V's original character, I loved the references to Emma Goldman and the Sex Pistols — but particularly I enjoyed the way the Wachowski's have updated the story in its detail, but not in its form. As the comic did, the narrative mentions "the way the meaning of words changed" — but the Wachowski's have used the more recent euphemisms "collateral" and "rendition" for their examples.

The TV-footage-style flashbacks and clips that illustrate Britain's slide towards fascism blend the ranting-on-a-podium imagery which is so ubiquitous in dystopian film with eerily familiar-sounding news reports. Images of "America's war", for instance, or the reference to people being "interned at Belmarsh", gave the film an urgency it would have lacked if the setting had been less contemporary. The effect was enhanced by the fact that, as a Brit, seeing any film based in this country is a relief amidst the domination of American cinema. Just seeing motorways instead of freeways lightens my heart.

V For Vendetta stirs all sorts of political and philosophical debates: about V's nihilism; where power lies; the ethics of political violence and revenge. I hope this film gets more people to look at today's situation — broadly, the "war on terror" — from a different perspective. There is an ever-present threat of tyranny in any democracy, and the swift transitions to tyranny that we can see in history are quite alarming. Today we have two camps: the complacent majority that hardly notices the government's creeping authoritarianism, and the 'lefties' who cry 'fascism!' far too frequently.

I'll leave you with the one line that stuck with me from the comic, and which I think and hope will stick with others walking out of the cinema: "people should not be afraid of their governments; governments should be afraid of their people."