The only man ever to enter Parliament with honourable intentions
Here's a pretty old post from the blog archives of Geekery Today; it was written about 17 years ago, in 2007, on the World Wide Web.
Remember, remember the Fifth of November,
The Gunpowder Treason and Plot,
I know of no reason
Why Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot.Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes, t’was his intent
To blow up King and Parli’ment.
Three-score barrels of powder below
To prove old England’s overthrow….
Good evening, London.
I would introduce myself, but truth to tell, I do not have a name.
You can call me
V.Since mankind’s dawn, a handful of oppressors have accepted the responsibility over our lives that we should have accepted for ourselves.
By doing so, they took our power.
By doing nothing, we gave it away.
We’ve seen where their way leads, through camps and wars, towards the slaughterhouse.
In Anarchy, there is another way.
With Anarchy, from rubble comes new life, hope reinstated. They say Anarchy’s dead, but see…
Reports of my death were…
… Exaggerated.
Tomorrow, Downing Street will be destroyed, the Head reduced to ruins. An end to what has gone before.
Tonight, you must choose what comes next. Lives of our own, or a return to chains.
Choose carefully.
And so, adieu.
Follow
You know, there are many reasons to be terminally annoyed with the Wachowski brothers, but what they did to V tops the list. Ah, well. One day, their efforts will be consigned to the dustbin of $1 DVD bins (or whatever medium and price they’ll use in the future), and V will be read to children everywhere.
My dirty secret is that I actually rather like the film of V for Vendetta. I doubt that I would have liked it nearly so much if I hadn’t read the comic first, since I’d have far less idea what it was supposed to be about, but there are enough scenes that beautifully capture something really important in the book (Evey transfigured on the rooftop; V’s conversation with Delia) that I have trouble hating on it for very long.
On the other hand, V is also a great practical argument against copyright. If not for intellectual enclosure, somebody other than the Wachowski brothers could have gone in and made an effort to fix up the weak parts. I’m imagining a film that’s about 30 minutes longer, so that the characters’ ideologies and motivations are actually explained, with the existence and importance of Fate explained, and with the visual design retouched by Alfonso Cuar?@c3;b3;n, who actually knows something about how to visually convey an authoritarian surveillance State with something more subtle than just jackboots.