Information Retrieval

I’ve already shared my disappointment with V for Vendetta, and today, my colleague Iain Murray has his take on the mangling of the original graphic novel at TCS Daily. Probably the best article I’ve read so far, though, on the problems with the film is Matt Feeney’s Slate essay on the profound differences between the best Britain-as-futuristic-fascist-state movie, director Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, and the petty, self-important haranguing of Vendetta. Both films tackle similar material, but only Brazil truly understands the incompetence and suffocating grip of bureaucracy gone made. As Feeney says:

Whereas V for Vendetta adopts the highly movieish perspective of an avenging Übermensch who has himself escaped the tyranny that ensnares everyone else, Brazil observes the totalitarian order from within. It presents the subjective experience of administrative tyranny. And it presents this tyranny not as expressing the conscious design of an evil omnipotent dictator everyone can wholesomely hate, but as an inexorable process that slowly envelops the individual trying to navigate it.

If you’ve haven’t seen V yet, don’t bother. Do as Iain advises and read the comic instead, or just rent Gilliam’s masterpiece (available, I’ll add, in a luxurious 3-disk box set from Criterion).