Anti-Hero Week: V for Vendetta

Good day and hello readers!  Welcome to Day 1 of Anti-Hero Week.  To start us off right how about a dystopian timeline under a white supremacist (No I don't mean Ron Paul won the elections) regime?  With anarchy in the streets of the United States, a pandemic called St. Mary's Virus raving the better portion of the known Europe, The UK is about the only still stable country ruled by fear and oppression.   Anything deemed unsavory by Norsefire was removed to concentration camps including homosexuals, racial minorities, free thinking leftists are all taken away within the first year of power.  This is V for Vendetta.

Now you have erred!

V: I told you, only truth.  For 20 years, I spoiled only this day. Nothing else existed...  until I saw you.  Then everything changed. I fell in love with you Evey.  And to think I no longer believed I could.


With oppression made to look like order, the tyrant leaders of Norsefire have a new problem to worry about.  On November 5th, a man in a outlandish black outfit wearing a Guy Fawkes (member of the Gunpowder Plot attempting to blow up House of Lords in 1605) mask calling himself V (Hugo Weaving of Sky Pirates, ...Almost, Proof, The Matrix, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, Transformers and Captain America: The First Avenger) saves a young girl Evey (Natalie Portman of  Beautiful Girls, Garden State, Star Wars: Phantom Menace, Free Zone, No Strings Attached, Thor and Thor: The Dark World) from the Fingermen planning to violate her for being out after curfew .  Making his way into a private broadcast, he announces to the viewers of said channel that are watching to meet him in one year, on November 5, outside the Houses of Parliament of which he decrees he will destroy,  Norsefire's "Fingermen" secret police attempt to capture V but ultimately fail.

Is my nostril hair apparent???

Inspector Finch (Stephen Rea of  The Crying Game, Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles, The Last of the High Kings, The Musketeer, On the Edge, Bloom and Tara Road) has been assigned the dubious task of capturing and unmasking the vigilante known as V but must dig deep into investigation to find who this man is or was to have been made such a public enemy of the land.  As his investigations go further and more deaths attributed to V he finds his country is a much darker place than he could have imagined.

All hangs on the impending year as defacto dictator Adam Sutler (John Hurt of Alien, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Aria, Spaceballs, Wild Bill, Hellboy, The Oxford Murders and Doctor Who: Day of the Doctor) demanding order and that this masked social deviant will cause the downfall of their utopia.    Will the people rise up against this totalitarian state and have their freedom or will V's words fall on deaf ears?

A few points of difference from the source material vs the movie.
Graphic novelist Alan Moore (Swamp Thing, The Watchmen, V for Vendetta and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) wrote this as he view the 1990's would become under the extreme views of Margret Thatcher's conservative being down on what she deemed subversive behavior.  in the graphic novel, the Norsefire was freely elected and bio-weapons were not plot based.  Fascism seems almost neutered in the film with the exception of the note by Valerie Page an actress incarcerated for being a lesbian.  Racial purity is not covered and is actually seems almost it was completely avoided.
 
The domino scene where V tips the black and red dominoes to for the large V involved 22,000 dominoes and took 4 professional assemblers 200 hours to set up.   During the fight sequence in Victoria Station, the stunt-men are moving in actual slow motion while Hugo Weaving's stunt double (David Leitch) moved in real time.  Shooting the whole scene in 60 frames per second gives the illusion V was a whirlwind among the grass.

This is not the masquerade ball?