V for Vendetta (4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray) [4K UHD]

The 4K package contains blu ray disk so I could compare them on a calibrated LG OLED C4 83 inch TV with a good theatre sound system.Sometimes I found 4K disks worse than blu rays, too dark or something else. Not here.The BIGGEST difference is probably faces. After watching 4K and switching to blu ray, all faces become orange man faces. Back to 4K HDR and you see beautiful natural skin.Sound is much better on 4K too. I compared Dolby DTS tracks on both disks and even bitrate is higher on 4K disk, but the sound quality difference is much larger than what bitrate could suggest, so they clearly reprocessed it.Thank you for this wonderful restoration.And, yeah, the movie is great!

PILOJ is the acronymn for "Proscription In Lieu Of Justice". Proscription means banishment. And, here, in "V For Vendetta", where govt killing is to be avenged, and where justice is impossible, V's penalty for banishment is death.Until justice is done... We are, of course, in the twisty-turny world of justifying vigilante killings. When a govt does not protect citizens from murder, when a govt is instead responsible for the murder of its citizens; when a govt does not protect citizen rights, when a govt instead violates its citizen rights; when a govt's representatives act as though they live above the law and do not obey the Constitution, then justice must be considered to be impossible. And, the vigilante may properly contend, if those conditions hold, then that govt's claim to the consent of its citizens is forfeit, and that govt is illegitimate until justice is done.When authorities have made justice impossible, when they've wired down a society's pressure cooker's safety valve--stopping all possibility of change--and then have cranked up the heat by continually disobeying the Constitution, there's only one result to be sanely expected.Americans are there, doing that. Stories such as "V For Vendetta" give us a basis for discussion, a point of departure for speculation.Vigilante killings, in some pure sense, are wrongful murders. You cannot take the law into your own hands when you live under the rule of law. If you do, then you must expect to pay the piper.However--no matter how genuine the rule of law seems to be at the time--every era has many persons who think they live above the law, as well as many persons who live outside the law. Such persons can always arrange circumstances in which their killings--their wrongful taking of lives--makes justice impossible for ordinary citizens to obtain. It's the way of the world and has been since the earliest codifications of law. Well--with the sole exception of Switzerland, the only nation in which democracy is directly in the hands of the people at all jurisdictional levels.If we, as ordinary citizens, with no ability to make justice happen under our govt, banish a wrong-doer and his/her helpers from our society, we can choose any penalty for the banishment that we choose. If the person is clearly guilty of robbery, not murder, we may penalize him/her by taking wealth--money and property. If the person is clearly guilty of wrongfully taking lives, then killing that person and his/her helper(s) is arguably justifiable.And so, into the twisty-turny world of vigilante killings.The fictional man called "V" lives under a totalitarian govt that has proven itself to him to be guilty of many murders. It's a fascist govt very similar to Hitler's Germany, the infamous 3rd Reich. Under such govts, ordinary people cannot make justice happen.After his near-thing escape from a research center--in which a lethal virus and its cure were developed, killing dozens--V watches as the politician-killers take many tens of thousands of lives with their own cureable virus. He then prepares himself for about twenty years, and then jumps up his campaign to topple the totalitarian govt.He blows things up and kills as needed to keep himself free. Under the cloak of state-controlled news media, he kills men and women whom he knows are directly guilty of wrongful death. He also kills their helpers, for example, policemen. Ultimately, he cuts down the criminal govt's topmost leaders.Killing helpers is a bit of a stretch legally, but those who aid others in wrongful killing are themselves part of the "felony murder" conspiracy. So V's killing of the regime's policemen--as with Robin Hood's killing of "the Sheriff's men" in the late 12th Century--is arguably the killing of those guilty of conspiratorial felony murder and therefore arguably justifiable.You don't step very far away from Robin Hood in any dealings with vigilante justice. The History Channel's priceless documentary, "The Real Robin Hood", should be on the viewing list for anyone chewing on vigilante justice. Sure, it's probably a grautuitous hype for the Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe movie, "Robin Hood". But it's the outlaw's backstory, no matter how far in the future the outlaw runs with his vigilante justice. Surprisingly, Crowe's touchstone of Robin Hood's taking rights and liberties from the rich and giving those to the poor so that justice can be done is "spot on", as the Brits say, for today's needs.In any event, the key here is that V's killings are punishment for murders done by a govt that protects itself and its cronnies and under which justice is impossible. V's unsurprising intention is to take that liberty-set from the rich and powerful and then to give it to the poor and ordinary citizens. Hello, justice. Hello, Crowe and Scott. Hello, Robin Hood.That govt's self-protectiveness and illegal caring for its rich and powerful cronnies is, in fact, very similar to the US govt since the Reagan administrations in the 1980s. (See especially, "Inside Job", the 2011 Oscar-winning Best Documentary of the Year, which covers the causes of the 2008 financial meltdown.) The similarity of govts is what makes the movie, "V For Vendetta", an important topic of discussion and point of departure for ordinary Americans.The movie is done in a "filmatic graphic novel" syle, according to the filmmakers themselves. I didn't notice any filmatic nod to the graphic novel until V's final fight, you know, when he brings his daggers to a gunfight. Then the filmatic comic book effects fairly jump off the screen at you. The spun and hurled daggers are given the same visual after-images that you expect to see on a comic book's pages. Yes, it's CGI to die for.The film's story is based on a ten-issue comic book series and given the "graphic novel" upgrade tag. It's writers, and certainly the adaptive filmmakers, want it to be seen as something more than comic book logic.I'm not sure that the story makes it to that next level. The story has many twists and turns that smack of disjointed, disconnected comic book logic. Still, the story seems more engaging than something out of the straight, superhero, comic book genre.Some of the film's core features are things that our today's revolutionaries need to digest. Given the belief of enough people, V says, a symbol--say the blowing up of a building--can change the world. When V's bomb blows up the buildings of Parliament at the end--punctuated by a great sprong from the airborne Big Ben clock--the implication is that he's successfully involved enough people to bring down the V-decaptivated govt.Revolutionaries, make a note. Rule one is seeing democracy done. It's doers must be seen by its other doers--directly and beyond the reach of the sniveling superrich or their parasitic politicians. All the great democracy movements share this seeing. In the end, V-the-filmatic-graphic-novel shows the needed seeing of democracy done.--spib, 23 Dec 2011

AS DESCRIBED

Remember Remember the 5th of November - the Gunpowder Treason and Plot. I can not think of a reason why the gunpowder treason shoud ever -- be -- forgot. Thanks for the movie guys!

Exactly what I wanted, now my collection is complete...I have V for Vendetta on DVD, Digital, BluRay, and 4K, now I have it on HD-DVD (Yes I have an HD-DVD player lol)

Movie - 4.5V for Vendetta strikes me as a well-scripted Chex Mix that serves as a superhero, revolutionary, and revenge movie all at once. But what makes the gunpowder treason and plot so interesting is the character of V himself and the circumstances in which his "quest" ultimately reveals a number of poignant observations. Aside from the obvious parallel between he and The Count of Monte Cristo, I particularly find the whole "rebellion against authority" theme to be a refreshing testament to the way certain governments can sometimes be a bit too controlling or ironically naïve for their own good, which in turn can cause said revolution. This is best portrayed through the character of Evey who, along with everyone else, had conformed and obeyed to the whims of a harsh and suffocating dictatorship for so long. And as history (or even science) has proven, for every action, there is indeed an equal and opposite reaction; authority <--> rebellion. But in one of the more unique twists, this revenge and rebellion is all catalyzed under the guise of a Guy Fawkes-masked vindicator whose actions also indeed can fit that of a textbook terrorist. 9/11 undertones are easily apparent when they mention the symbol of a building being destroyed and its ability to change the world for better or worse. I don't know when this graphic novel was written, but apparently the symbolism is justifiably and eerily accurate for what it's worth. I suppose it just depends on which side you're coming from and the amount of subjectivity involved when trying to observe such events. But in the end, I really enjoyed this movie for its extremely good choice in having cast Hugo Weaving as V and Natalie Portman as Evey. The only problems I had were a few pacing issues with the screenplay, that might've been better resolved with either a longer run time or more immersing musical score.Video - 3.5Presented in VC-1 with a 2.40:1 aspect ratio, I took a look at the bitrates (mostly in the high teens and low 20s) and it appears Warner Bros. used the exact same transfer from the previously released HD-DVD (aka the more inferior release). After reading the BD review of Batman Begins, I am now convinced that during the format war, some movies may have unexpectedly gotten the shaft in terms of a faithful transfer/encode. Because of the mere max capacity of 30GBs on a dual-layered HD-DVD, there wasn't as much space for as good a transfer/encode. The result: a few movies not quite meeting up to BD expectations LIKE a Batman Begins, V for Vendetta, and whatever else I might have in my library that was caught up in the war. Needless to say, while the BD presentation here is good, it's probably nowhere near as good as it could be. Colors are vivid, but not as in depth as I've seen in older, albeit newly-encoded, titles. Sharpness is around what you'd expect for an HD presentation, but some scenes looked a tad grainy and fuzzy (and not the good kind, like a Bourne Identity on BD, which by the way was re-encoded and looks great with the higher bitrates). Blacks aren't particularly deep either, which is a shame as it's a pretty dark movie. I'm disappointed, but it's better than DVD anyway...Audio - 4.0In addition, this TrueHD 5.1 track also seems to be a direct copy of the HD-DVD's. I don't have any HD-DVDs to compare, but I've heard other Warner Bros. titles with the same option, and they are remarkably more in depth than what we're given on this BD. Most of the film is dialogue and comes through very crisp (not that it should be hard), but the more action-focused scenes were lacking in surround usage. Music (one of the problems I had with the film overall) also seems less immersing than I'd like (where at least Batman Begins had a terrific score). LFEs were pretty good on a couple of scenes, though, such as the first fight where V introduces himself and that very cool montage with the dominoes. It's not quite up to snuff with other BDs having only an average bitrate between 1.6 and 2.1Mbps, but it's better than regular Dolby Digital.Extras - 3.5I enjoyed the extras, which consist mostly of behind-the-scenes footage concerning production and writing, but I felt there weren't enough. The one segment making comparisons between V and a terrorist is especially interesting, though they could've offered a little more subjectivity to the ideas and overall concepts of what this could represent in society. All features are in SD.Overall - 4.0I really enjoyed this film for its unique twist on the superhero genre -- to essentially portray the hero as a terrorist. Much like its script (which is supremely enunciated by Hugo Weaving), the cast is excellent with a special commendation to John Hurt who basically just talks on a giant TV for most of the film. But regardless, the plot itself touches upon many subtleties about authority, self-will, the power of symbolism, and its ability to withstand the test of time, be it through censorship, controlled viewing, etc. I highly recommend this for the great story. But with only an average A/V transfer thanks to HD-DVD's inferiority and the laziness of Warner Bros. studios to do a proper re-encoding, we fans of V may have to wait for an eventual double dip, along with some of their other catalog titles.