Haven’t read the original or seen the movie but I read somewhere that Moore wrote it because he was terrified and hated Reagan. Was that the case?
Messages I got had more to do with the nature of humanity, the futility of trying to solve ALL of the worlds problems at once, and how far some people will go to achieve their own ends...
When it comes to our current wars for democracy and struggles for identity, Moore has more than a few words to say about George W. Bush, Tony Blair, comics, Ronald Reagan, "Friends," holy wars, quantum leaps and his own peculiar place in cultural history. I spoke to him by telephone from his home in England.I find quite a few similarities between the fascist dystopia of your early work, "V for Vendetta," and our current political situation.
Well, the one thing with writing stories about the rise of fascism is that if you wait long enough, you'll almost certainly be proved right. Fascism is like a hydra -- you can cut off its head in the Germany of the '30s and '40s, but it'll still turn up on your back doorstep in a slightly altered guise. I'd agree that the current situation is particularly alarming. I tend to think that this momentum seems to have sprung up entirely from a group of largely discredited, extreme right-wingers who have been skulking in the shadows since the Ford administration and have suddenly come into the light of day surrounding George W. Bush. I think they've overreached themselves, at least I hope that.Actually, I was going to mention him. Especially his recent sanctification by America's television news media.And I really hope that people are not morally lazy or weak enough to elect this guy; I won't say "again" because he wasn't elected the first time. And it is true to say that across the world there is quite a lot of anti-America sentiment, which is different than anti-American sentiment. I think that even in the majority of Muslim countries that have been polled, nobody blames Americans -- they blame George Bush and the people surrounding him. Mind you, we'll see what happens this November, because you can have someone take over your country once and still have it be an accident. But twice? Well, that would be regrettable. [Laughs.]
TV and politics have always made inevitable bedfellows, but the results have been disastrous. Look at the situation we have now. Let's say that tomorrow someone who is a political genius were to emerge -- and I'm not expecting this to happen, but say that it did. Say that a politician emerged who seemed, for once, basically competent, who seemed to be able to do their job as well as the average cab driver, comic writer or journalist. If they were the most intelligent, visionary, humane political thinker in the history of mankind, but were also fat, had some sort of blemish or something that made them less than telegenic, we would not be able to elect them. All we're able to elect are these telegenic, photogenic crypto-Nazis. As long as they look good. I suppose it's too early to go into my rant on Ronald Reagan? That would be tasteless.
[Laughs.] Well then, OK. You've got Ronald Reagan -- the much eulogized, recently deceased former president -- who everyone seems to have forgotten was regarded as one of the most low and treacherous individuals by those in Hollywood that he sold out to the McCarthy hearings. This is someone whose response to the AIDS epidemic was probably responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide. This is someone who created Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, or at least set in motion the policies that would create these creatures. This was the architect of much of the world's present misery. Why did we elect him? Because he had been in a lot of films that some quite liked. We thought him an honorable man because in his films he played a lot of honorable men. I believe there are some who believed he had an outstanding war record. Even Ronald Reagan himself talked with misty eyes about the time he liberated concentration camps, which he may have done in a movie. But Ronald Reagan was out of World War II, fortunately for him, because of ill health. So all of his memories of military service came from movies. I've got to say that there are probably better people to elect than film stars...
Alan Moore can write some interesting comic books but it doesn't change the fact that he's a conspiracy minded liberal bigot. Maybe the biggest reason to hold off on seeing this movie is to deny him and Hollywood $$$.