This is not a review of the V For Vendetta comic. Nor is it a review of the V For Vendetta movie. Instead, it's got elements of being a review of both, a compare-and-contrast mixed with a bit of appreciation. If you haven't yet seen the movie or read the comic and you fear spoilers, you're probably better off not reading. There will be spoilers for both movie and graphic novel in this review. But if you've read or seen one version, they're probably not going to spoil your enjoyment if you haven't read or seen the other yet.
That out of the way, here's the basic question: Is V For Vendetta any good? From a pure craft perspective, I'd have to say yes to both versions. V For Vendetta the comic can be pretentious, a bit long-winded and occasionally too slow-paced for its own good (not unlike Moore's other magnum opus, Watchmen), but it is, in my opinion, one of the best works ever produced in the comics medium. V For Vendetta the movie has issues of being "too Hollywood" and strays rather far from the graphic novel, but it gets the thematic heart of the book right and updates it nicely for a post-9-11 age, based on the fears spun in the Bush/Blair era instead of just those from the Thatcher/Reagan era that inspired the graphic novel. If you were to ask me which one is better, I wouldn't hesitate a second before saying the graphic novel, but that's due in some respect to Moore having a lot more time and space to work with the story in that format, whereas the creators of the film had only 2 hours and 12 minutes in which to tell their tale.
V For Vendetta the graphic novel is about a London that has survived a nuclear war, but only by having an oppressive government headed by the Leader wipe out anyone who isn't a white heterosexual in camps. One of the survivors of those camps becomes the masked man known as V, adopting the anarchic philosophy and masked visage of Guy Fawkes and taking under his wing one Evey Hammond, a 16-year-old girl driven nearly to prostitution by the death of her parents at the hands of the forming totalitarian state when she was younger. Evey finds herself drawn into V's plots, V murders his way through a series of foes and a detective tracks the history of the mysterious terrorist protagonist until everything comes together in an explosive finale that forces the people to choose between being afraid of their government and taking back their country.
V For Vendetta the movie is about a London that has survived a biological plague, but only by having an oppressive government headed by the High Chancellor wipe out anyone who isn't a white, religious heterosexual in camps. One of the survivors of those camps becomes the masked man known as V, trying to restore democracy by adopting the masked visage of Guy Fawkes. He takes under his wing one Evey Hammond, a twenty-something girl who works in the media, despite the deaths of her parents and brother at the hands of the forming totalitarian state when she was younger. Evey finds herself drawn into V's plots, V murders his way through a series of foes and a detective tracks the history of the mysterious terrorist protagonist and the truth about the biological plague until everything comes together in an unbelievably explosive finale that forces the people to all dress up in masks and face down the armed forces of their restrictive government in order to take back their country.
If you read all that, you probably got that many of the changes in the versions are of a surface nature. Plague instead of nuclear war, the addition of religion to the corrupt government, a notable change in Evey's fortunes and a slight shift in the motivations and methods of both V and the detective (Mr. Finch). About half of these changes bring the story more in line with the changes seen in the world between 1981 (when V first began) and 2006 (when V the movie was released). Little things like television replacing radio, with Prothero being a television personality ala Bill O'Reilly instead of a radio voice, fit into this category as well. The other half, unfortunately, look like the result of studio notes or Hollywood laziness. The protagonists all have to be made a little more squeaky clean, not as damaged as the more interesting and rounded characters of Moore's story, and for all that the movie is gaining notices for its morally complex look at the nature of terrorism, it's really pretty watered down from the much more dangerous V of the graphic novel.
V For Vendetta is a thinking person's action movie, with relatively sparse action scenes compared to the usual American action movie formula. V gets some "badass moments", including a couple memorable knife vs. gun fights against the police, but there's a lot of time spent on character development, particularly the slow awakening of Detective Finch and Evey Hammond to the level of corruption in their government, that you wouldn't see in most action movies. There's also a notable change in Gordon, who is Evey's lover in the graphic novel and sympathetic boss/father figure in the movie, and most of the scenes between Gordon and Evey play out in the film as an unnecessary reinforcement of themes that both the character and the audience should already have gotten at that point. It's not a bad character, it's just unnecessary, and when you look at all the complexity that has been removed from the villains of the piece, it seemed like a bit of wasted screen time.
That's probably the biggest difference between the movie and the graphic novel: the level of subtlety, complexity and layered plotting going on. Even at just over two hours, the story of the movie has got to be a focus on the relationship between V and Evey, with Detective Finch's story serving as basically a time clock on the bad guys catching up with V and a good place to put exposition about the character. In the graphic novel, Moore spends a lot of time on the Leader, showing him not as a one-dimensional demagogue almost cartoonish in his similarity to Hitler but as a broken man whose hatred has left him with only one love, a fealty to a computer system that helps run the vast machinery of the government he heads. The Fate computer system is entirely absent from the movie, and thus the rather clever allegory that V engages in within the pages of the graphic novel, mixing up Fate and the statue (and concept) of Justice as if they were unfaithful wives, is entirely absent as well. And rather than the Leader being executed by a broken widow for crimes he himself helped perpetrate, the High Chancellor is murdered by a conspiracy between V and the corrupt Mr. Creedy, head of the secret police. Mind you, the obnoxiously hard-to-read phonetic Scottish accent of Creedy's associate Harper is entirely absent from the movie, and that can only be an improvement.
While the movie takes place in England and definitely has some English elements to it, it does feel more than a little bit Americanized, especially when compared to the graphic novel. The darkly whimsical sense of humor found in the graphic novel, especially in V's insanity, is a particularly English sensibility, and the movie, while occasionally funny, more or less loses that for a more straightforward noble polemic. In the book, V is undeniably crazy and dangerous, and while the ends he reaches wind up being to the good, the means by which he reaches them are generally portrayed as suspect and even villainous at times. In the movie, V has a slightly off-kilter sensibility (if nothing else, wearing that outfit all the time marks him as a bit off), but he's generally portrayed as noble and heroic, justified in his actions even when he's committing murder or torturing Evey in the name of freeing her. The movie goes too far in making sure that V, Evey and even Detective Finch are portrayed ultimately as sympathetic protagonists, leaving the moral uncertainty in the story behind, and that is probably its biggest flaw.
However, it is interesting to note the change in tone between the movie and the graphic novel, not just in terms of the odd sense of humor but the overall look and feel of the future. The graphic novel's London, portrayed by the fairly dour and dimly lit artwork of David Lloyd, has a bit of a post-apocalyptic feel to it, and the takeover of fascism seems easier to believe as a result. The movie presents a world not very much unlike our own, where everyone goes to their jobs, watches television, and doesn't really think about all that's wrong with the world so much as how things are getting by for them on a day-to-day basis. In that way, the movie V For Vendetta is actually more subversive than the graphic novel. It's easy to imagine standing up behind a mad bomber when your government is taking people you know away to camps and maintaining an obviously bleak sense of order. Not as easy when your day-to-day routine is rarely disrupted by the excesses of the government, and there's a strong feeling that you can get by as long as you don't do the wrong thing, step out of line, behave in a way that is considered abnormal by the majority. But the movie presents a world that is recognizable and yet absolutely frightening in the corruption of the powers behind it, and even if the protagonists had been more tarnished as they were in the graphic novel, they would have seemed justified in taking action.
Ultimately, both versions of the story are flawed works, but both are also very well done and worth the time. Given that the graphic novel makes such perfect use of the comic book medium for layered and inter-linked plotting, deep characterization and literary reference and metaphor, it's impressive that anyone was able to use the film medium to get anywhere close. However, even though whole scenes and dialogue, and indeed the general shape of the plot, are copied to film, the feel and design of the movie is quite different. V For Vendetta the film will definitely please you more if you think of it as "inspired by" the graphic novel rather than an adaptation of it, and if you are someone who has seen and liked the film, I would definitely recommend the graphic novel as a deeper and more satisfying work.
