This is the only one of the Waschoski brothers films that I've ever seen, I didn't like it when I saw it a few years ago, and I wasn't really looking forward to rewatching it for this class. I still don't like it now (and I even found a drinking game to play before I watched this movie, but it didn't help).
I have no idea of how this film compares to the graphic novel on which it is based (since I never read it), but there was a great deal of potential that this film had, that was utterly wasted by the Washoski brothers. The film was intended to make a statement about certain aspects of American political culture in the wake of 9/11 and the Iraq War, which surely needed to be done, but this (and the Tom Cruise film Lions for Lambs) were not it.
First of all, there's huge levels of V and Guy Fawkes which they apparently missed. (Maybe its covered in the graphic novel, as I said, I didn't read it, so I don't know.) The letter "V" was a symbol of British resolve during WWII, and anyone doing a quick Google search can come up with dozens of images of Winston Churchill giving the "V" sign (which looks slightly different than the "peace sign") during the war, as well as being the Roman numeral for five (which ties it into the 5th of November, a pretty important day to Brits, as I understand it), it also ties into Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, which itself, was a symbol adopted by the British during WWII (the Morse Code for "V" sounds similar to the opening notes of Beethoven's Fifth) to help show their resolve during what seemed like the darkest hours of the Empire.
I'm guessing that the creators of the graphic novel actually knew this stuff, and that's why they choose to use it. (England, after all, does have a long and rich history, and they could have cribbed from Tolkien or Cromwellian England for inspiration if they were looking for historical-type influences in general. Quite clearly, it seems to me, they were looking for a specific period in time, that would have definate connotations for many people, to frame their discussion about contemporary England in. Even if they didn't have these consciously in mind when they created the graphic novel, they no doubt played a part in their thought processes at a subconscious level.) It seems to have been lost on the Waschoski brothers, however, who just thought it'd make a "cool" movie, and they interjected their own ham-fisted ideas into the original concept. (They did, however, have some grasp of what the graphic novelists were trying to get at, as they cast John Hurt, who played Winston Smith in the 1984 film version of Nineteen Eighty Four. An almost clever bit of casting.)
The whole lesbian subplot (you know, when Evey reads the toilet paper in "prison") was just absolutely unnecessary and wrong. I have nothing against gays, or even the protrayal of them in film, but come on, if you're trying to say that those who indescriminately persecute those who are "different" will soon turn on those of us who are "ordinary," then having lesbians (or some other minority group) as your "poster children" is the wrong way to go about it, since large numbers of people will think that this is somehow okay. Much better if they had cribbed from Arthur Miller's The Crucible which he wrote in response to the witch hunts of the 1950s where some folks were certain that there were Communists lurking behind every corner.
Okay, so now I've checked the Wiki entry for the graphic novel (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_for_vendetta) and sure, enough, it turns out that the creators of the comic had intended very different things than what we see in the film, and they were really upset (even going so far as to call the film makers "cowardly") at what ended up on screen.