David Appleby/Warner Bros/Dc Comics/Kobal/ShutterstockA deadly virus ravages and changes society for the worse. A fascist leader runs the country and his goons are disappearing people off the street. Late night talk show hosts are being silenced for speaking out against the regime. This all describes the plot of V for Vendetta, but it doesn't take more than a cursory reading of the latest headlines to see why the dystopian graphic novel adaptation might feel especially relevant these days, 20 years after it came out. It would be wrong, though, to say V for Vendetta predicted the future, and it's hardly the perfect movie for our times. Instead, the past two decades have emphasized an emotion that was always present in the 2006 movie but may have been buried under the stylized action, iconic mask, and depictions of righteous resistance. V for Vendetta is very sad.The legendary comics scribe Alan Moore didn't intend for V for Vendetta to be a reflection of America in the 2020s when he wrote the graphic novel in the late '80s. It wasn't meant to be a reflection of America in the '00s and a response to the Bush era and Iraq War, either, though that's certainly what the Wachowskis' screenplay was responding to. Moore, who has disavowed the film the way he has disavowed just about all adaptations of his work, was angry at Margaret Thatcher's Britain and imagined a dystopian English future where a masked anarchistic terrorist fought against a fascist state. Moore, who is famously a crank — and in most cases, justifiably so — probably wouldn't love to hear that a Yankee is finding the movie version of a story he wrote nearly four decades ago so relevant when he wrote the story for a very specific reason. (He's also probably pissed, though not surprised, about the TV adaptation HBO's developing.)Starring Hugo Weaving as the eloquent and deadly masked terrorist V and Natalie Portman as a young woman who becomes involved in his campaign against Britain's fascistic high chancellor (John Hurt), V for Vendetta was a comic book movie from the era right before superheroes fully took over the box office. The start of the MCU in 2008 was also the end of the Bush era, and so V for Vendetta was both developing blockbuster comics-inspired action and exploring the political realities of the Global War on Terror as it interpreted Moore's graphic novel. Rewatching now, these two instincts clash and muddle the themes a little. As he whips knives and kills goons, V is very much a badass hero. V is a good guy fighting against evil and rallying the masses to a noble cause. The baddies, despite being British, are coded as an American cautionary tale. Expository dialog repeatedly mentions how "America's war" caused the states to collapse and an extremely conservative Britain rose up in its wake. The violent, righteous hero can be a stand-in for liberalism, the villains a "what if?" exaggeration of neoconservatism.It was easier, in 2006, to see V for Vendetta as a story about a dystopian future and the masked man who saves the day. This was extremely naive. It's harder to be naive in 2026, in part because some of the parts of V for Vendetta that seemed more fantastical 20 years ago have actually come to pass in some version or another. The St. Mary's Virus of the film is viscerally much scarier now that the audience has lived through the COVID-19 pandemic. The cancellation of Stephen Colbert's Late Show or the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel Live! last fall after the Trump administration objected to the content of his show aren't nearly as extreme as V for Vendetta's equivalent, when Stephen Fry's talk show host gets beaten, abducted, and executed following a Benny Hill-style spoof at the high chancellor's expense. Still, the parallels are on-the-nose enough. Masked agents in the streets, imposing banners of the dear leader's face adorning government buildings, talking heads warning about the "others" who threaten the nation's strength and unity… It's a lot, cumulatively.Of course to only now be so struck by V for Vendetta's resonance is telling on one's privilege a little bit. There was injustice in this country and the world 20 years ago. For all the lucky audience members who watched V for Vendetta in 2026 and were entertained by its fanciful dystopia, there were people who were already living a life that much more closely resembled the grim society depicted on the screen. The movie knew what it was doing back then and it showcased it well; it's just that it's that much harder to deny just how much more obviously blatant the similarities are in 2026. The corrupt, fascist England that V struggles against seems like less of a metaphor for where we're headed than a warped depiction of where we already are.V for Vendetta was prescient, but it’s hardly the perfect movie for our times. | David Appleby/Warner Bros/Dc Comics/Kobal/ShutterstockIronically, there is one way that V for Vendetta feels less relevant now than it did 20 years ago; the Guy Fawkes mask V wears. The hacker group Anonymous adopted the mask after the release of the movie, and throughout the '00s and '10s they launched a series of cyber attacks targeting the Church of Scientology, the Russian government, and others. Your mileage may vary on how righteous or effective this hacktivism was, but their use of the Guy Fawkes mask could almost be seen as comforting: V for Vendetta's dystopia is a fictional future and yet in real life we do have a version of the good guy already fighting back. Anonymous is still around in some form, but they're far less ubiquitous and you don't see the Guy Fawkes mask appear in the news much — you just see the sorts of the things that V was fighting against when he wore it.There are indeed plenty of heroes fighting back against injustice today without the need of a Guy Fawkes mask. The most inspiring, optimistic part of V for Vendetta comes at the end when normal, every day people rise up. That's a hopeful and essential note to end the movie on considering how much sadder it is to watch these days. The epic parts feel false and the upsetting parts feel more real. Maybe that's how it always should have come across: the somber depiction of life in a fascistic state is a key part of V for Vendetta's power as a film. The movie hasn't changed; we're just better able to recognize it.V for Vendetta is streaming on HBO Max.