“By the power of truth, I, while living, have conquered the universe”.

I rewatched V for Vendetta for the first time in many years tonight and it was rather eerie how prescient the film was, and in particular Alan Moore’s genius graphic novel that it was adapted from.

Perhaps the greatest legacy from the film is the iconic mask that ‘V’ wears in the film, seen across protests and anti establishment marches ever since and immortalised by the Anonymous Collective in real life.

Comic fans and purists took issue with the film adaptation, especially it’s softening of several aspects of the graphic novel’s core message. V in the books is more anarchic but the film presents him seemingly as a voice for democracy. He also has a softer stance on the populace essentially being to blame for being in this predicament, ruled by a fascist state that punishes homosexuality, artistic freedom and any form of dissent. Nevertheless you are presented with a morally ambiguous character who is certainly no saint. Is he a force for good, evil or just chaos? Is the removal of one evil necessarily the seed to implement something better?

Without going too much into the story, and if you’ve never seen the film or read the book, it’s a great work of dystopian fiction that has depressingly become closer to reality in the time since its release.

In what seems like an increasingly intolerant world where censorship is on the rise and individual freedoms curtailed, it’s rather cathartic to see a mass rebellion and people standing up to the tyranny they face before them. Seeing what the UK has become under the misrule of a hateful Tory government masquerading as our saviours is pretty much on point.

The background of the story tells of an epic American war which ultimately led to this chain of events, once again, with the precarious situation we find ourselves in with a potential World War 3 on the horizon, there is a plausible reality where it isn’t as far fetched as it might seem.

The technology we have today is of course more sophisticated, with the likes of twitter and tik tok, and as such more difficult to control, but the human implemented algorithmic biases of our social media along with warped reporting of events in Gaza have shown that enough careful censorship and linguistic tomfoolery in the mass media, will mean the majority will not question what’s being fed to them. Although my hope is that this is slowly but surely changing and attempts to stop it are merely delaying an inevitable shift in history, where the Imperial Western narrative is being pushed back against.

In the legendary words of Alan Moore, spoken via V:

‘People should not be afraid of their governments; Governments should be afraid of their people’