Today about books I read and movies I watched recently.
V for Vendetta
My oldest is 13 so we can watch great classics together. He knows most of them from internet memes so I can treat him to the full experience. We’ve done Star Wars and Lord of the Rings a long time ago, also Indiana Jones and Back to the Future. This year we watched Matrix and Escape from New York on an art cinema here in Stockholm, both went down with him pretty good.
So I was thinking what could be next. V for Vendetta came to mind and I realised that I had only seen the movie, not read the original graphic novel. The local library had a copy so I picked it up.
Remember, remember, the fifth of November. Gunpowder treason and plot. The Guy Fawkes mask now associated with Anonymous and V for Vendetta originates in a 1605 plot to blow up the British parliament. A symbol of violent and illegal resistance to power, still celebrated or at least commemorated in UK every year in spite of its blatant failure to bring about change.
V for Vendetta takes place ten years into the future after a nuclear war with Soviet. A fascist government has taken over UK. All undesired have been terminated in extermination camps. Still, crime and hardship is the norm. Eliminating the scapegoats has not made Britain great again.
A vigilante dressed as Guy Fawkes performs acts of resistance. Blowing up government facilities and saving damsels in distress. The unfolding story is fascinating with many plot twists. Clever use of the format to portray the world and further the story like in The Vicious Cabaret where V performs the back story.
My son enjoyed the plot twists and the challenge of reading the slang spoken by some characters. Personally, I liked the extra material where Alan Moore tells how V for Vendetta came to be. As a creator I’m fascinated by how chance and circumstance fuel the creative process.
Putin's worst enemy
Author and journalist Kalle Kniivilä published a book about Alexei Navalny in 2021 (Putins värsta fiende : Aleksej Navalnyj och Hans anhängare it is called in Swedish). I picked it up from its cover in my local library.
The book zoom in on the events leading up to his poisoning, recovery in Germany and return to Russia in 2021. From interviews with those close to the events, Kniivilä gives a detailed view that helps understand who Navalny was and why he did as he did. We also get a glimpse of the Putin authoritarian regime. How it projects power through servants eager to please but not always competent.
Knowing the outcome — Navalny died in prison in xxx — we can truly appreciate Navalny’s sacrifice. He refused to cower in fear, instead ridiculing their attempts to force him into submission. One of the 20 lessons to combat tyranny published in Timothy Snyder’s 2017 book On Tyranny is Don’t obey in advance. Navalny certainly embodied this and other ways to fight tyranny.
The author has published a final chapter on his website on how the world learned of the death of Navalny in March 2024.
The Ministry of the Future (2020)
Kim Stanley Robinson created a science fiction novel about how the climate crisis unfolds and how humanity overcomes the crisis.
Published in 2020, it imagines that an agency is created within UN to speak for future generations. Correctly pointing out that while our actions today have disastrous consequences for the future generations that will populate this planet, the invisible hand that guides today’s markets pay little attention to value realised far into the future.
I had a hard time finishing this. But also, I wanted to finish it. I was hooked on the premise. Really, how did Robinson imagine that the climate crisis could be averted?
The story kicks off with a heat wave killing millions in India in 2025. Still, I much prefer living in the world described in the story than the reality we see today with a second Trump term and humankind caving for fossil fuel. A world where people across nations somehow agrees to work together. Stop flying. Revert to sail for shipping containers. Pump water from under the Antarctic glaciers to slow down their march to the sea.
The novel has some very poignant moments. About who really decides on fossil fuel. Stories of how extreme weather events unfold and how these are experienced by people on the ground. But I can’t help but disconnect from the universe outlined in the novel. How unlikely it is that people across nations come together and magically agrees to stop acting selfishly. Setting the interests of future generations over their own comfort here and now. It’s just as implausible as a romantic feel good novel where the couple spontaneously near the end morph into new versions of themselves so they can live happily ever after.
The novel concludes with a bit of romance. Which is the part of the story that is easiest to believe. I don’t know. We will not find the solution in this book. But maybe reading it will kick off new thoughts that will help us find our way forward. Giving up is not an option.
Sisu (2022)
Imagine a Tarantino movie about a Finnish ex soldier killing nazis at the end of WWII. This is Sisu, except directed by a Finn. Sisu is a Finnish word and concept, meaning to never give up, to pull through hardship.
As the movie unfolds, we realise that our hero has an almost mythological larger-than-life plot armour. Dodging bullets, explosions, diving into ice cold water, crashing with a plane. Our hero finds the extreme way out of a hopeless situation that nobody else saw. Always with a fig leaf of plausibility.
Once we accept the premise — that our hero will never die, never give up, always find a way out, — we can enjoy the movie for the visual story telling, the action scenes, and the clever use of scenery to serve us a feast of a movie.
Sisu is currently streaming on SVTPlay, the streaming platform of Swedish public media.
Alien (1979)
I had forgotten just how excellent the 1979 movie that kicked off the Alien franchise was. SVTPlay had the original Alien movie streaming in November, together with the second and third instalment.
I watched Alien first time as a teenager in the late 1980s. We had rented a movie box, me, my sister and my childhood friend. We had picked up three VHS cassettes at the local outlet and I don’t remember why we picked up exactly that movie. I wasn’t much into horror and scary stuff, perhaps we picked it up as a science fiction story. Between us, my friend and I had quite a collection of Star Wars toys.
VHS quality on a small tv screen with mono speakers couldn’t have done much for the experience. But I still remember how mesmerised I was by the unfolding story of the unlikely hero steeping up to defeat the unknown. Because we didn’t know anything about the movie or the universe. Alien was just some random B-movie for all we knew.
Rewatching almost 40 years later, knowing what followed, I really enjoyed how the story was told. Lots of visual story telling. The camera panning through the spaceship interior. Slow, packed with details. Makes it feel real. The crew small talking over breakfast. Smoking, bitching about not getting paid enough. The pinups in the workshop. The cat!
Then confrontation. Brief flashes of the unknown. The face hugger. The chest burster. The fully grown monster slashing from above. We barely realise what happened, then it’s on to the next scene, building up the tension for the next scare.
Nothing that followed was anywhere close.