Another pro-terrorism film: V for Vendetta

From the Counterterrorism Blog:

What are the Warner Brothers studio and parent company Time Warner thinking? They’ve released a movie, “V for Vendetta,” that is simply a pro-terrorism movie. Sure, it hides behind an attractive theme of “revolution” against a totalitarian government, but the methods it promotes are right out of the Al Qaeda 9-11 attack handbook by blowing up London landmarks and justifying it as resistance: “Blowing up a building can change the world.” The fact that this movie is also anti-Christian, with a modified cricifix employed as the symbol of the government, only adds to my distaste and my disappointment in TW.
I wrote on February 3 that Hollywood doesn’t get it when it come to terrorism, citing “Syriana,” “Valley of the Wolves Iraq,” and “Munich.” And on January 23 we posted comments from a homicide victims’ father about the legitimization of the bombers in “Paradise Now.” At least we have Universal Studios finishing “Flight 93” about the heroes who fought to keep the fourth hijacked plane from hitting its intended target on 9-11. Since I wrote that post, I’ve received some positive comments about the efforts made in that movie to “get it right,” so I look forward to seeing perhaps ONE in-theater movie this year in which terrorists are not glorified or the U.S. is not “the enemy.” As for “Vendetta,” I hope audiences engage in one against TW and Warner Brothers by not seeing the movie.

AlsoRelapsed Catholic has treated the subject:

“In fact, modern so-called anarchists are usually working to increase government power.>They form an important faction of the antiglobalization movement, agitating for stricter regulations on international trade. To judge by the sometimes violent protests at World Trade Organization conferences, the latest anarchists are usually grungy kids with strange hair and piercings; it is hard to say for certain, but they have probably spent more time listening to Rage Against the Machine and the Clash than reading Godwin or Proudhon.
[…]Well, some of them are probably more familiar with Kropotkin than Joe Strummer, who today’s kids probably lump in with Sinatra as someone from the olden days. But this essay points to one reason I became disillusioned with the movement; “if we’re anarchists who don’t believe in borders, why are we protesting Free Trade?” I’d asked stupidly, and was stared at and shushed. So I kept my ambivalent thoughts about Reagan (who said a lot of sensible things about Big Government) to myself. And since “anarchists” have been “agitating for stricter regulations on international trade” since back in my day, that indicates a movement, such as it is, that’s been running on fumes for 20 years at least.
As this piece points out, anarchism has an ok intellectual history. But if anti-WTO protesters bothered to read Rothbard, they’d get the shock of their lives: “This guy’s a capitalist!!”

But, horribly, it’s at the top of the box office in the US (from WorldNET Daily):

“The ending of ‘V for Vendetta’ celebrates terrorism when the movie’s three most sympathetic characters carry out an evil plan to blow up England’s Parliament building, one of Western Civilization’s most enduring symbols of democracy and republican government with a small ‘r,'” he wrote.
Baehr also says the whole movie is “a thinly veiled attack on the War on Terror now being waged by Prime Minister Tony Blair in Great Britain and President George W. Bush in the United States.”
The final credits include recordings of Malcolm X spewing racial hatred and violence and recordings of Gloria Steinem “spewing her brand of male-hating, Christian-bashing, androgynous sexual politics.”
“The rest of ‘V for Vendetta’ not only depicts Christians as evil people who oppress and torture ‘innocent’ people, it also depicts homosexuals as a persecuted, harmless minority of ‘nice’ people,” wrote Baehr.
[…] Critic Manohla Dargis had this to say: “Thumb suckers of the world unite: The most hotly anticipated film of the, er, week, ‘V for Vendetta,’ has arrived, complete with manufactured buzz and some apparently genuine British outrage. … Is the man in the mask who wants to make Parliament go boom Osama bin Laden or Patrick Henry? Or just a Phantom of the Opera clone who likes to kick back to the cult sounds of Antony and the Johnsons? Your guess is as good as mine, and I’ve seen the film.”
Critic Peter Bradshaw wrote: “It’s also for Valueless gibberish. Yet another graphic novel has been bulldozed on to the screen, strutting its stuff for an assumed army of uncritical geeks – a fan base product from which the fan base has been amputated. This film manages to be, at all times, weird and bizarre and baffling, but in a completely boring way. Watching it is like having the oxygen supply to your brain slowly starved over more than two hours.

”
The British Telegraph tells us why this film is just a miserable one:

The script, by the Wachowskis, differs considerably from Moore’s novel, which is set in the 1990s and contains allegorical digs at Margaret Thatcher’s Britain. The film, set in a ravaged, crumbling London in 2020, when most of the rest of the world has been destroyed by biological warfare and viruses, has been updated to reflect current fears about what a future totalitarian state might repress – free speech, homosexuality and Islam, among other things.
Moore’s outspoken denunciation of the project has proved a major embarrassment, although the filmmakers have attempted to brush it aside.

Right Wing News has also commented the film:

V for Vendetta begins in England, 2020, which is run by fascist Christians who murder gays, exaggerate the threat of terrorism, and who literally appear to listen in on everybody in Britain. If that sounds like some sort of Chomskyian vision of America, that’s because the filmmakers intended it that way. In fact, the film goes out of its way at every turn to draw parallels between the bizarro world left-wing view of how America is becoming and the dystopian Britain of the future.
Political dissidents are jailed, criticism of the government is not allowed, gays are murdered, you see prisoners in Abu Ghraib style hoods, the government carries out germ warfare attacks and blames terrorists for them, the media is controlled by the government, and art is banned. All of this is done by the cartoonishly evil “Conservative” Party which is supported by at least one pedophilic priest, government operatives called “fingers” who apparently rape women for being out after curfew, and armies of generic government thugs.
Into this nightmarish world comes our, “hero,” Osama Bin La…excuse me, V. If you asked a liberal like Michael Moore or Ted Rall to imagine himself as a terrorist, V is what you’d come up with. He’s an extremely intelligent, witty, art lover who also enjoys old music, classic movies, and murdering members of the Conservative party — but only with knives, no guns, presumably because guns should be banned.
Natalie Portman plays Zarqawi to V’s Bin Laden after he rescues her from government rapists and over time, like a college professor instructing a student too naive to realize how “evil” Republicans are, he wins her over to his cause — which is murdering members of the Conservative party and blowing up historic buildings for freedom’s sake.
Now, before I go on, I know what many of you are probably thinking: “Come on, Hawkins, you’re making this review too political. It’s a movie and it’s not even set in America…” What can I say? The movie isn’t subtle. It uses a jackhammer to thunder home its political points. At one point it shows a “Coalition of the Willing” poster with a swastika on it. It blames the current troubles in Britain on, “America’s war.” The whole movie is built over top of the lunatic vision that wild eyed liberals have of America.
In any case, setting aside the, “Terrorism is wonderful and conservatives are evil,” theme of the movie, is it any good? Well, my guess is that the movie going public will break down into three large groups. If you’re conservative, you’ll find it to be a depraved movie. If you’re liberal and maybe a bit twisted, you’ll enjoy the movie because you’ll see it as sticking it to Bush and the fact that it glorifies terrorism, something that will horrify red staters, will make it all the sweeter for you. As far as everyone else goes, my guess is that they’ll just be bored because politics aside, this movie isn’t exactly, “fun for the whole family,” or for that matter, anyone in the family, unless perhaps your last name is Arafat.

So the Totalitarian future State will repress free speech, homosexuals and Islam because it’s Christian. I am going to dedicate this cartoon from Cox and Forkum to these marvellous cheap fortune-tellers:

Looks like the cartoons have proved the other way round…. I am really no fan of the Wachowski brothers (I did not like Matrix very much and the 2nd and 3rd part were really rubbish), but now I have a very good reason not to see this Vendetta. I also am dissappointed to see that Natalie Portman plays a role in this film: I thought that as a Jewish herself, she was going to be more compromised against terrorism. Looks like she is not.
By the way, on the other hand, I am saving a lot this year in cinema…