10 Films That Stick It To The Man

2. V For Vendetta

Surely the most subversive film ever produced by Joel Silver, V For Vendetta takes place in an alternative future (it says here) where people are imprisoned and tortured for their beliefs and not even poor Stephen Fry is safe. The dictator of this dystopian wasteland (a member of the Conservative party, no less) is played by the late great John Hurt, whose casting is not an accident – he also played Winston Smith in 1984.

Calling himself V, a vigilante wearing a Guy Fawkes mask gives hope to the atheists, immigrants, Muslims and political opponents who’ve been tagged as “undesirables” and sent to concentration camps. In between devising a plot to destroy parliament, V conducts a personal vendetta against the people who experimented on him decades earlier when he was a camp detainee, but he’s no monster: when one shows remorse for her actions, he kills her painlessly.

It’s a very subversive movie indeed that references the 7/7 bomb attacks before climaxing with the destruction of parliament, something that probably wasn’t lost on the protesters who subsequently adopted the V mask. Less impressed was Alan Moore, who refused to watch the film, asked not to be credited and stopped selling his work to Hollywood.