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Emily Browning is sixteen. Which, you know, would make one a bit of a wrongcock, but is the orrect age for Evey.
Reread the TPB last night and had a nasty rumble of doubt. The thing about the comic is that V himself actually plays a relativly minor role. His influence is felt throughout, but he doesn't get as much "screen time" as you may remember. Nor does Evey, really.
The comic is highly novelistic in that the supporting cast is huge (at least for a work of this length) and the narrative is dense with subplots and agendas. These will doubtless be thinned in order to focus on the V-Evey arc, even though it's really a relatively small piece of the whole.
Especially given that (and there's a plot-specific SPOILER here, so if you haven't read the comic
LOOK
AWAY
NOW)
...it's Rose Almond who kills the Leader, while V himself is off-stage. In the comic it plays beautifully, because we've watched Rose's continuing debasement with horror and pity for quite some time—but it seems to violate one of the basic rules of cinematic storytelling, which is Do not take the climax away from your protagonist.
When you're reading the book, of course, two things are clear: (1) in fact it is the English people themselves are the protagonist, rather than V (who is more properly a catalyst), and (2) the killing of the Leader isn't really the climax, because the Leader is not the State—he, too, is but a catalyst, a functionary. I would venture, actually, that V isn't even really a character, as such: he is an ideology—which is made explicit in the denouement.
The problem is that while this may work in a novel or even a comic, film by its nature (I would argue) tends to reduce ideological conflicts to interpersonal ones. This can work even on a one-sided basis—"1984" worked on film it was Winston Smith, a character we knew and cared about, vs. Fascism.
V for Vendetta, though, is Anarchism vs. Fascism. And while that works on the page, where the experience and the thrill are primarily intellectual, I have a fear that it's going to be alienating onscreen, and lacking in visceral identification. |
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