A savior, for people who don’t want to be saved
I was watching The Matrix a few nights ago, and it struck me that the problem the Wachowski brothers had with the Matrix sequels is the same one they had with V for Vendetta: if they had done them right, they would have been movies about a savior among people who didn’t necessarily want to be saved.
Take a look at the ending of The Matrix. What’s the next movie? Neo trying to set the slaves of the matrix free. Imagine how you would feel about a man with miraculous powers who claimed that the world we live in is just a computer simulation, that we were, in fact, slaves to our computers in the most literal sense, that the real world was a desolate wasteland, and that he could free you from slavery to live in that desolate waste.
Imagine that this savior can even prove it, up to but not including seeing the rows of pods. Anyone who goes to see the pods either doesn’t see them, or dies. He, of course, claims that they didn’t die: they were set free.
Free to live in a desolate waste. Where all he can offer is pain and dreary toil as you rebuild the world of the real.
What would your choice be?
That’s a hard movie to make, so, instead, they just went with car chases, explosions, and some patched-up Jesus symbolism at the end.
V for Vendetta was the same thing: a story about a world where everything was controlled, in this case, by the government1. Destroying the dictatorship and taking their freedom meant destroying everything that made their life comfortable. The movie never touched on that; it cut out the most important parts of V’s speeches and it cut out the ending that made it clear what V’s promise for the future, in the short term, was.2
It’s no good blaming the drop in work standards upon bad management… though, to be sure, the management is very bad… But who elected them? It was you! You who appointed these people! You who gave them the power to make your decisions for you! While I’ll admit that anyone can make a mistake once, to go on making the same lethal errors century after century seems to me nothing short of deliberate… You could have stopped them. All you had to do was say “no.”
What happens when all of those people watching fireworks as the government buildings explode go home, and discover that all communications are dead? Phones are dead. Television is dead. Cable is dead. The Internet is dead3. There is no government. The police have gone home—or are hiring out to the highest bidder. It wasn’t just their corrupt government that they were throwing out. It was every worldly thing that ever mattered to them. All they have left now are their freedoms and their friends—and they’re going to find out who their friends really are.
Freedom’s a tough thing to offer in the real world.
A government which, in the book, was freely chosen without trickery in order to maintain comfort. That was the most egregious change from book to movie.
↑I still don’t know if the book’s ending was meant to be a “happy” ending in the context of the story.
↑There aren’t even many cars. Only the most powerful or connected people in the book are shown in cars. Cars are freedom, and were probably one of the freedoms people had to give up in exchange for comfort. Throughout the entire 257 pages of the book I see only four or five private cars. One was unidentified, but looked just like Adam Susan’s vehicle later. Three were outside of the church attended by the number two men just beneath Adam Susan. There are potentially two more chauffeured vehicles, and there’s one cab, used, again, by one of the number two people. Even the Voice of Fate rides the subway.
↑
- Matrix End of your world
- “I am going to show them a world… without you. A world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries. A world… where anything is possible. Where we go from there, is a choice I leave to you.”
More The Matrix
- The Adjustment Bureau
- A potentially great movie, The Adjustment Bureau devolves into a chase and a cheap love story in the final third of the film. It’s as if they ended the first Matrix movie with Trinity and Neo settling down in the suburbs of the Matrix.
- The Matrix
- Wow! People are already talking about this movie as the new Star Wars, and they may not be wrong; the future will decide. It has all the right elements: action, story, mythical heroes, perhaps an overemphasis on the messiah bit, but otherwise a kick-ass movie.
More V for Vendetta
- The Third Face of V: The Freedom to Starve
- Are V and Veidt heroes? What do they really do that’s different from what Norsefire did, or from what the Tales of the Black Freighter protagonist did?
- The Second Face of V: The Twilight of Man
- Moore’s stories aren’t just about overthrowing an oppressive regime. They’re about a superior being overthrowing an oppressive regime because normal humans won’t—they’re doing the job Britons, Americans, and the Worldly Wise won’t do. How much are they about the decline of mankind in favor of something else?
- The First Face of V: A Crucible of Fire
- V is a creature of man, born of fire and perverted science. He is the savior of man, giving his life to usher in a new world of freedom and individual liberty. Including the liberty to die.
- FiVe Faces of Alan Moore’s SaVior
- V, Veidt, and Constantine are very much the same person, each ushering in a new era of human greatness through their own devious means. Even Promethea and Faust, and Moore’s interpretation of Jack the Ripper, share that vision to a lesser extent. What do these five faces of the same man mean?
- V for Vendetta: A Love Story
- The Wachowski brothers took a great book but failed to overcome typical Hollywood cliches, making V for Vendetta little more than a love story for terrorists.