Flutterby™! : V for Vulgar

Charlene and I have been wanting to see a good film, and we'd heard good things, so we went out to V for Vendetta last night. While we didn't walk out, we were both sadly disappointed. Why can't screenwriters assume I've got two neurons to rub together to make a thought? Why do directors think I must I be force-fed similarities in character development? I think the creator of the original comic strip, Alan Moore, says it fairly well:

The baby is one I put a great deal of love into, a great deal of passion and then during a drunken night it turned out that I'd sold it to the gypsies and they had turned out my baby into a life of prostitution.

Decent editing could have easily culled it from its two hours and twelve minutes. Decent writing could have introduced some ambiguity, provoked us as viewers to ask questions, rather than simply (and stupidly) portraying the society as one of cowed citizens against oppressive fascism. Decent directing could have let us capture similé without intercut flashback that tried to browbeat us into accepting symbolism. And I don't know if this is a function of the initial comic as well as the screenplay, but the whole Guy Fawkes reference could have been explored as the much more nuanced situation that historically it seems to have been.

I had been hoping for a film of ideas. Instead I got a film of overly melodramatic action sequences, flat characters, and trite political simplicities. Skip it.