However, the filmmakers also selected John Hurt for the role of the tyrant who stripped away his country’s civil liberties. The film’s cartoonish dictator, High Chancellor Adam Sutler, is clearly meant to resemble Adolf Hitler. One of the most chilling (and familiar) beats of dystopian hell envisioned in V for Vendetta is the Orwellian presence of a Big Brother. Yet, if one looks around, it becomes apparent that we are tiptoeing ever closer to the dystopian future that V for Vendetta warned so vehemently against… A Government for the People That Watches the People And with it being so specifically fitted to those critiques, it should in theory seem very dated in the third year of President Donald Trump’s tenure in the White House.

Just as sweeping as its brava rebranding of Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture,” V for Vendetta remains a pop culture artifact about the anxieties felt on the left in the waning years of George W. In the process, Moore’s V went from being the poster child for anarchy to a defender of classical liberalism. Alan Moore purists might forever remain skeptical of such praise since by reimagining a seminal anti-Thatcher ‘80s hit piece, the Wachowskis essentially reworked the entire narrative as a brutally anti-Bush allegory (and reconfigured Weaving’s V and Natalie Portman’s Evey as a surprisingly convincing star-crossed pair of lovers from The Phantom of the Opera mold). 5 (or any other day), because director James McTeigue and the Wachowskis’ best screenplay to date succeeded at shrewdly adapting the V for Vendetta graphic novel to the big screen. Nevertheless, the film is always worth remembering on Nov. More than a decade later that film’s success at celebrating radical political ideas can still be felt by the fact that a movie which glorifies terrorist action (blowing up Parliament and Big Ben) is considered a classic in many circles, and is routinely viewed at the beginning of every November by movie fans the world over. It’s almost a fitting bit of irony that the film’s iconic visage of uncivil disobedience-the sleek and sexy reworking of a Guy Fawkes mask on Hugo Weaving’s face-has similarly become ubiquitous with anarchists, counterculture subversives, and online hackers, who all wear the trademarked Halloween item… that they helpfully purchase from the very capitalist friendly Warner Brothers’ merchandising arm on Amazon. But for many millions the world over, the poem is now synonymous with V for Vendetta, a shockingly subversive studio movie that was released in 2006.

These are the words that have accompanied hundreds of Guy Fawkes Day celebrations ever since that eponymous Catholic failed to blow up Parliament in 1605. I know of no reason why the gunpowder treason should ever be forgot. Remember, remember the fifth of November, the gunpowder, treason, and plot.

V for vendetta book