From the Wachowski Brothers: “In a rare concession, authorities here agreed to close down all of Whitehall, between Trafalgar and Parliament Squares, for a three-night film shoot earlier this month. The scene on the third night was wild. Hundreds of crew members and their equipment gathered in Parliament Square, flooded with light against the backdrop of Big Ben and the London Eye. Tanks patrolled the streets. More than 100 extras playing government commandos in army camouflage formed a line in front of Parliament, while some 400 others playing rebels marched en masse down Whitehall.

Such is the near future imagined in V for Vendetta, a forthcoming Warner Brothers movie, in which Britain is ruled by a band of brutal fascists, Natalie Portman is a rebel with a shaved head, and the hero-cum-vigilante, V (played by Hugo Weaving), spends the entire film shrouded in a costume that includes a black cape and a grotesque face mask.

But the most radical thing about the movie, written and produced by the brothers Andy and Larry Wachowski and based on a 1988 graphic novel by Alan Moore and David Lloyd, is its climax. This is a story in which a dozy, passive populace wakes up and rises against its government oppressors – and then, in the name of freedom, blows up Parliament.” (New York Times )