oh boy... I just can't wait for the Reich!!

I wondered after I saw the movie as to what we're supposed to take away from it. Perhaps I only have this perspective because I live in the Bay Area and am regularly exposed to liberal ideas over the internet, but it seems to me that the gist of it - all that rebellion and never give up your individuality and all that - is pretty played out.

I really liked the Matrix because it adressed issues of individuality versus "the system" and eventually got past that: Revolutions questions the value of individual identity, asks what it is and what it means, rather than taking it as something grand and romantic to fight for.

V was a good movie. The explanation of the backstory was kind of patchy: it wasn't given to us as a string of clues leading up to a realization of what really went on, but in awkward chunks, some more significant or relevant than others. Other elements seemed a little too simplistic: Portman's character is extremely credulous and naive, and that V "fell in love with her" seems very token - it doesn't really fit except in the sense that we're watching a Hollywood movie, and somebody has to fall in love with somebody in a Hollywood movie. The assistant to the High Chancellor or whatever the office was actually taking the Chancellor to V was stupid. And overall, stepping back from the romanticism of the characters and wondering for a minute what V really accomplished by destroying the government and himself in a grand act of martyrdom: who will lead the nation? Who will actually give out the vaccine that apparently infected the rest of the world? Now that Portman no longer has a government to fight - one that she was conditioned to fight and built her whole life around fighting - what will she do?

Sadly, V for Vendetta doesn't really consider such questions. It espouses a romantic revolutionary spirit that does not pause to consider practical or realistic concerns. That isn't a problem with the film as a piece of art - that's a problem with the fact that it encourages the audience to adopt the anti-authoritarianism it puts across, though of course not in such an extreme fashion as V does - and a problem with the fact that people do and will buy that philosophy or something similar.