V For Vendetta vs 12 Monkeys

V for Vendetta is a rarity among recent science fiction: it looks like something, sounds like something, and is actually about something. It doesn’t play, like so many of its contemporaries, like something created on the internet, or to sell cars or soundtracks or video games. V for Vendetta actually appears to have a script. It’s good, but not great, which is fine, because it’s grand. V for Vendetta looks like an event, like a movie that wants to be debated and poured over carefully. It’s got traces of everything from Kubrick to DePalma to Burton. It’s exciting, emotional, and more than a little silly. It’s March, my only other option is But Ma! Matthew McConaughey Loves His Room! I’ll take more than a little silly any day.

V For Vendetta is set in London, in the near-future. The United States has been gutted by a virus, and is now unable to finish all the wars it started. As a result, England has become a paranoid police state, with its couch-potato society bullied into a strict curfew. No one seems to mind much, but then we never see them doing much else besides watching television. I’d judge them, but the only thing that excites me more than American Idol on Tuesdays is American Idol on Wednesdays, so you know, people on glass couches.

Among the drones, there are a few rebels, chief among them V, a vigilante in a Guy Fawkes mask, who plans gestures of violence as a means to sending messages to the masses and the machine (there’s a very Big Brother presence in London, with their dictator constantly spewing rules and propaganda). He’s essentially a terrorist, but any attempts to tie him to actual terrorists will be in vain. V is much more like Batman with an exhibitionist streak. V meets up with Evey, a young woman who works at a local television station. She’s out past curfew, and is being attacked by guards when V steps in and kills them in her defense. Later, while V is attacking Evey’s station to ambush a telecast, she helps him escape, and they’re on the run. Actually, they’re just in V’s fantastic apartment, but it’s not like there was no running.

Evey is suspicious of V and his tactics, but he makes her eggs, and he’s got cool stuff like jukeboxes and movie posters (his lair is as tacky and set-obvious as the hideouts on the old Batman TV show, and I love every bit of it), and soon, he’s beginning to make sense. They separate, after a perverse mission spooks Evey, but eventually they reunite, with Evey more jaded and wise, and Guy Fawkes Day nearing.

V for Vendetta was produced by the Wachowski brothers, from the Matrix movies, and they’ve been getting all the press and credit for the film. I’d just like to point out that it was directed by James McTeigue, who served as Assistant Director not only on the Matrix movies, but also on Attack of the Clones, which means he’s put in a lot of hours on a lot of sci-fi movies for virtually no credit. As far as I’m concerned, he was in charge here, because V for Vendetta looks nothing like those movies, but fits more in line with A Clockwork Orange, Fahrenheit 451, and the Tim Burton Batman movies. V for Vendetta has an artifice that works so well, with looming shadows, propaganda images in red and black, and the best use of slow-motion since the original Matrix. The fights are few but well-staged, the editing is quick, and the score is that menacing kind of score that accompanies melodrama more often than fantasy. V for Vendetta is a movie, and knows it, in the best way.

Of course, by at least eighty percent, I was there to see Natalie Portman. You think I’d see this shit for Milla Jovovitz? Natalie Portman has come of age, folks. She’s no longer impressive for someone young; now she’s just flat-out impressive. As Evey, Portman delivers on all fronts: her British accent is spot-on, she’s funny, flirty, smart, and in a series of scenes in a prison, devastating. Evey is being held in solitary confinement, shaved bald, hunger-striking, desperate for the autobiographical notes she receives from the woman in the next cell. Portman’s performance is all the better when you begin to realize (as I did, about a quarter of the way through the movie), that most of her lines are being delivered into the emotionless mask of V. Normally, this would result in an actress coming off like she was ordering at the drive-thru for an entire movie, but luckily, Natalie Portman has three Star Wars movies worth of experience with acting opposite emotionless clowns (you know, like C3PO. Who did you think I meant?), and is more than prepared for her scenes with V. After this and her gangsta rap on SNL, Natalie Portman can officially count herself as my Celebrity Girlfriend. Feel free to make eye contact with the camera on talk shows, Natalie, so that I know you’re talking directly to me.

Oh, and Hugo Weaving plays V, doing madcap flourish gestures and talking in Jon Lovitz’s Master Thespian voice. He’s overdoing it, probably, but in a role where we don’t even get to see him blink, we should probably let him camp it up some.

So see V for Vendetta, after having prepared yourself for more 1984, and less Fifth Element. And then get yourself home and put in 12 Monkeys, because that’s what you wanted, and you didn’t even know.

I hadn’t seen 12 Monkeys since it was in theaters about ten years ago, but I watched it this weekend, and it rocks more than ever. First, let me get this out of the way, so that some of you naysayers might get back on board: 12 Monkeys has some of the worst wigs in the history of movie wiggery. There, I said it.

12 Monkeys was directed by Terry Gilliam, who hardly ever finishes a movie, but never leaves any doubt about who was in charge. 12 Monkeys is as unusual and mind-bending as Gilliam’s best work (that cheerful score is just wrong, Gilliam, you sick bastard), and the performances are thrilling. Bruce Willis has never been less Bruce Willis. He rocks. 12 Monkeys is the Bruce Willis movie for me, and I can’t believe I waited so long to watch it again. He stars as James Cole, a convict in the future sent back in time again and again, trying to subvert the release of a virus that wipes out most of humanity. I get a perverse rush out the earliest scenes of these experiments; James isn’t in some spotless white space station or laboratory. He’s in a filthy, burned-out basement, wrapped in plastic. And when he’s sent to the wrong time during his first trip, he winds up in an institution with Jeffrey, a rich crazy activist, played by Brad Pitt. I like Brad Pitt so much more when he’s unhinged, and he’s great here. He’s all twitches and ticks and eyes crossing, and normally that shit drives me up the wall. But Jeffrey isn’t just a character for Pitt to play, he’s a character for James Cole to encounter, and as that, he’s just one more link in the nightmare. Madeline Stowe plays the other most vital role in James’ journey, and she’s great in the way that so many actresses are that we mysteriously never see again. Where the hell is Madeline Stowe? She’s not going to show up on TV next season as a judge, is she?

Like V for Vendetta, 12 Monkeys makes a lot of its hay off of other movies. All of the movies I mentioned that influenced V for Vendetta are here, as well as the Terminator movies, Back to the Future, and Vertigo, the latter of which 12 Monkeys is practically a tribute.

If nothing else, 12 Monkeys provides the pleasure of hearing Bruce Willis say “All I see are dead people”, which, on my recent repeat viewing, made me gasp, then laugh, then wonder if maybe Bruce Willis really is bouncing in and out of the nineties, all shaved-headed like Evey, and rocking 12 Monkeys over and over. I wouldn’t blame him if he was.

V for Vendetta: B+
12 Monkeys: A