V for Vendetta was ahead of its time. 20 years later, reality has finally caught up.

Was Alan Moore wrong about the Wachowskis' take on his acclaimed graphic novel?

Yet, while I sympathize with Moore about the film “defanging” his original work to appeal to American audiences, I’ve found that the Wachowskis' portrayal of the rise of fascism within the UK has only grown more relevant over time.

Set in a futuristic, dystopian Britain, V for Vendetta follows V (Hugo Weaving), a vigilante wearing a Guy Fawkes mask who recruits reporter Evey (Natalie Portman) to help him fight the totalitarian Christian regime led by High Chancellor Adam Sutler (John Hurt). With Sutler in control, the British population is governed through fear and propaganda. V directly challenges Sutler by bombing The Old Bailey criminal court in London. He then infiltrates and hijacks the state-owned TV network and broadcasts a call to action, telling the British people that in a year’s time they should meet outside the Houses of Parliament on the 5th of November to take back control.

There is an obvious American veneer to V for Vendetta that the Wachowskis can’t hide. Whether it’s Natalie Portman’s terrible British accent or the United States being the primary reason Norsefire was allowed to thrive unchecked, all roads lead to America. It’s no surprise that critics at the time were able to pinpoint V for Vendetta as an open challenge to the George W. Bush era and post-9/11 attitudes, particularly as Norsefire is portrayed as a conservative Christian government. While some felt it was un-American to challenge the government, others felt that doing so perfectly summed up the spirit of America.

There is a notion that the British people are more civilized than our American counterparts: that our stiff upper lip and penchant for being known as well-mannered and polite means we would never fall prey to far-right instigators and leaders like Donald Trump or Andrew Tate. It is an utterly false one. In 2005, V for Vendetta’s government-controlled news network, BTN, felt like an obvious stand-in for America’s Fox News. By spreading misinformation and spotlighting Christian television propagandists, BTN dehumanizes people of alternative faiths, as well as the LGBTQ+ community and immigrants. Two decades later, this cartoonishly evil network is as immediately recognizable to me as a spoof of GB News, a British news network known for its maligning of Muslims and immigration.

It isn’t just BTN that spreads hate and oppression in V for Vendetta. Christian propagandist Lewis Prothero (Roger Allam), known as the “Voice of London,” frequently spreads vitriol against those who oppose Norsefire — mainly the LGBTQ+ community and non-Christians. Whether he believes the things he preaches doesn’t matter; Prothero’s propaganda helps encourage the ethnic cleansing of non-white, non-heterosexual, and non-Christian communities. The content and tactics of Prothero aren’t so different from those of modern far-right agitators in the UK like Tommy Robinson, former leader of the English Defence League and an anti-Islam activist. Robinson’s spread of defamation against immigrants (and his subsequent documentary about being “silenced by the state”) earned him 18 months in prison in 2024. As the anti-extremist group “Hope not Hate” puts it, Robinson is “the best-known far-right extremist in Britain.” The parallels are clear, but considering Robinson actually received some semblance of justice in the UK (though he was released early from prison because of “a change in attitude”), perhaps the real UK isn’t quite as far gone as to require masked vigilantes to make an example of instigators like Robinson.

Moore’s criticisms of V for Vendetta may have seemed reasonable in 2006, but time has only shown that Britain is far from an exception when it comes to the rise of fascism. What Moore perceived as the Wachowskis’ focus on American ideology and anxieties seems, to me, to have accurately predicted a Britain that continues to grow more divided (and more dystopian) by the day.