Well, there were Mischief and Malarkies...

Finally watched V for Vendetta. Extremely disappointing, that. Okay, so in adapting a story from a longer medium there are going to be cuts, clearly. I'm not at all sure that the cuts here were the right ones (I really wanted to see the songs make it to film, both 'This Vicious Cabaret' and 'I Like the Boots'. Was fairly pleased to see a little bit of Storm Saxon...)

But beyond the cuts, the real problem with the film is the changes. The core of which is, of course, the one I'm alluding to in the title. The film's version of totalitarian Britain is simply a weak sister of the original. They should have kept the panopticon, shut down briefly by V, and not a place in which only a few people are surveilled. It should not have been a place where even the most popular TV host can think that he could possibly get away with lampooning the leadership. And, in the final scenes of the movie, there should certainly be multiple black people in the crowd, because V's Britain should be based on a foundation of genocide, not merely atrocity.

And, of course, another key feature of the books is that there should be nowhere else to go to. Having an America about, even engaged in a civil war, diminishes a lot of the work's point and makes multiple characters come across as idiots for not having left. The single line that was cut from the film that did the most damage has to be "Africa's not there anymore"...