Review: V for Vendetta by Alan Moore

I will give credit to Alan Moore for creating one of the strongest characters I have ever read. Let me give you a sense of that strong - not strong like the badass Lisbeth Salander, the girl with the dragon tattoo. Not at all strong like Katniss Everdeen, yet quite the opposite of her weakness. Not weak like Humbert Humbert, but strong like him, too. V is an enigmatic anti-hero of sorts. He operates with an unknown incentive at first, kidnapping a girl and bombing London’s iconic buildings. But through every monologue and every action, you know every aspect of the character V. You know exactly who the man behind the mask is, yet at the same time, if he passed you on the street, you’d be hopeless to point him out. You don’t know his name, height, weight, real voice, anything about him, and yet you know his life, his mind, his motives, his purpose. Alan Moore should be lauded for his ability to make you simultaneously understanding and clueless, and even more so for his ability to make you perfectly content with such an internal dichotomy. Even by the end, knowing nothing becomes knowing everything. If you were to know more, even the desire to know more, would destroy V as a character. This quote summarizes it all:

"First, you must discover whose face lies behind this mask, but you must never know my face.” - V

As for the storyline, this comes close, but at the same time nowhere close to Alan Moore’s Watchmen. Watchmen will always be one of my favorite stories of all time, a story that is infinitely too good for any adaptation on the big screen. V for Vendetta, has a similar approach of overdramatized plotlines and characters that make any adaptation for theaters too grandiose of a feat to accurately portray the intense scenes and vivid characters in the graphic novel. It’s has much more of a political focus, with anarchy as an overarching theme, with a bashing cynicism of Orwellian style government. The plot was page-turning, with a satisfying flow of suspense, mystery, action, and even some romance- if somewhat forced- too. But overall, for Alan Moore, this still comes second to Watchmen. However, what V for Vendetta does do right, and even better than my favorite graphic novel of all time, is develop a character so strong – sophisticated, disturbed, brilliant, that while he himself is ephemeral, the idea of him transcends life to become eternal.

Rating: 4