Book Review- V for Vendetta
Hello readers!
Today's review is a little late, I apologize. I wanted to add in a review of the movie to compare the differences and I didn't get to it until late the night before (Thank you Prime Video).
This book has been on my TBR for a few months. When I first started my blog, I was going through different blog posts ideas and I came across an idea to do a review on a book that was published the year you were born, which was 1990. So I took to Goodreads, found this list, and went from there. Although the original publication date is not 1990, I would assume, because I can't find anything to confirm, that it's listed as 1990 because that was after all of the original comics were published and were able to be bound into a graphic novel.
Now, onto the actual review.
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| V for Vendetta by Alan Moore and David Lloyd |
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Title: V For Vendetta
Author: Alan Moore, Illustrated by David Lloyd
Published: Vol. I was Published in 1988. The complete bind up I read was published in 2005
Publisher: DC Comics, Vertigo
Genre: Fiction, Graphic Novel, Historical Fiction.
Plot: ♥♥♥♥♥
Characters: ♥♥♥♥♥
World Building: ♥♥♥♥♥
Flow: ♥♥♥♥♥
Synopsis:
"Remember, remember the fifth of November..."
A frightening and powerful tale of the loss of freedom and identity in a chillingly believable totalitarian world, V for Vendetta stands as one of the highest achievements of the comics medium and a defining work for creators Alan Moore and David Lloyd.
Set in an imagined future England that has given itself over to fascism, this groundbreaking story captures both the suffocating nature of life in an authoritarian police state and the redemptive power of the human spirit which rebels against it. Crafted with sterling clarity and intelligence, V for Vendettabrings an unequaled depth of characterization and verisimilitude to its unflinching account of oppression and resistance.
Review*:
I've mentioned before that I like Graphic Novels and Comics. I also like villains or morally gray characters. So naturally, this is a story I could get into. I'll also include here, I watched the film years ago but I don't remember caring for it back then, so rather than giving you a vague comparison I watched it again. To foreshadow, I still don't care for the movie.
The bind up I got had the original artwork from the late 80's by Lloyd. At the end of the complete collection there are notes from Moore about the entire process of how they created V, who was involved, where they pulled inspiration from, etc. At the front of the novel is a small snippit from Moore that has a small description that gives you a pretty good timeline of when the graphic started to when it finished and a small outline of what was happening in the world at the time. This was very helpful to the rest of the story.
Now the tone for the novel was very political, which is something the film lacked and I think was the main difference. The movie, which is to no fault of the creators, was definitely watered down with the background set up in the book; the rations, the refinement camps, the Nazi-like events that caused V to retaliate the way he did. The exclusion of this part of the setting made the movie more, for lack of a better term, campy. For overall comparison, the movie added more into the novel than was actually there and changed some of the original events and characters.
To talk about just the Graphic Novel, I did like it more than the movie. Something important to remember when reading it is the time frame, Moore started working on this in 1983, the first comic was published in 1988 and it finished in 1989. The entire setting of the book is from November 1997- November 1998, a full ten years in the future. A lot of what fueled V's character and motive was built upon were fictional events that were possible outcomes to current events at the time.
What really made me emotionally invested in the story is what they watered down in the movie. I think learning about V and the reform camp added in the emotion of relating it to similar camps and the horrors that were conducted there, a.k.a. the Holocaust. In the small prologue from Moore, he mentions that England was considering reform camps for people with AIDS back in the 80's as the illness was discovered and continued to plague nations. Although we know the novel is fiction, the lead into reform camps for homosexuals, people of color, and of different religion wouldn't be that far off the mark of what could possibly happen. Again in the prologue, the threat of surviving nuclear war was mentioned, which is tied into our story by Evey mentioning seeing the yellow and black over the sky in London, flooding, and the food rations that common people were suffering through. The horrific fictional conclusions that Moore includes in the original comic were pretty impactful for the time considering the threat of nuclear warfare during The Cold War.
In the movie, the events are the same but different. The order is off, which I think for me made it hard to watch after reading the book. They also didn't carry the same amount of weight. The scene with Dr. Surridge was a huge moment in the books, it explained the motive of V and why he chose the victims he did to kill. In the movie, though they did include it, it wasn't correct to the story which in turn didn't make it as impactful. We didn't get the little human piece of V that was within the original story. Also, Gordon's life and death didn't occur the way portrayed. I do appreciate how the directors took some scenes and edited them to parallel others in the movie, like Evey hiding under the bed for both her parents and Gordon's death but that didn't happen in the novel. They completely omitted the strip club, which was a vehicle within the end of the comic but instead chose to make Gordon someone who longed for the freedom pre-war and had his own talk show. In the book, Gordon was killed for cheating some seedy characters. Those missing seedy characters transform the movie into the more clean version of the story.
The last, and probably biggest miss for me for the movie was the incorrect timeline. Alot of what made you understand the weight of the book events was knowing what else was happening in the real world when this story was being written and published. In the movie, it's definitely not 1997, the technology was too modern which really disconnected the events/motive. Even the flash back scene to Valerie the time frame was off for those events compared to our current story.
I would like to give some kudos to the movie. Natalie Portman did a great job, though she didn't portray Evey from the story, she really made the character her own. Outside of transforming Evey into a more mature character, her actual acting was what was so fantastic. There were far more quotes in the movie than in the novel, which only added to the story. Finally, my favorite bit about the movie was the clean visuals it supplied. The news clips to tie it in, the metaphor of the dominoes, etc.
I can't suggest one over the other. The book and the movie are similar, but with the subtle changes throughout the story it changes the perspective. I would suggest reading the novel first to understand what the story is supposed to be about and do a little research about current events from 1983-1989. If you watch the movie first, the graphic will more than likely be more dull than vice versa.
I didn't expect to get on this much of a tangent about the book vs. movie. Originally I was just going to write on the novel but since the movie was so popular I thought it was important to identify the differences should anyone be curious about picking one over the other.
I hope you guys liked this review. Let me know what you thought of the movie or the graphic novel in the comments below.
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