3. V For Vendetta (2005) Becomes A Freedom Fighter; All Original Meaning Is Destroyed
Most people were kind of psyched when it was announced that the Wachowskis (who directed The Matrix) would tackle V For Vendetta, one of the most beloved works in all of comic book history, for the big screen. Alas, they had a different notion as how to tackle the material, in the sense that they liked the concept and the aesethics, but thought they could use it to make a different point. And they did. In the comic, the main hero - V - is a terrorist, plain and simple. And yet in the movie, he's depicted as a freedom fighter - say goodbye to the point of the story. Alan Moore, who wrote the comic, said that the film version turned his work into a "Bush-era parable by people too timid to set a political satire in their own country. It's a thwarted and frustrated and largely impotent American liberal fantasy of someone with American liberal values standing up against a state run by neoconservatives - which is not what the comic V For Vendetta was about. It was about fascism, it was about anarchy, it was about England." V's agenda was only ever supposed to be of the anarchistic kind. Nothing else. He fought as a terrorist, and that was it. What's more, both the government and V were intended to represent different types of evil. In making V a fully-fledged freedom fighter, every inch of meaning from the comic is destroyed.