Dagny and I are grateful for the thorough review, JK. It prompted us to buy a copy last night and watch it ourselves. Unfortunately, the viewing consumed substantially more than the 132 minute running time as we had to continually pause the film for urgent trips to the kitchen to refill our Kool-Aid glasses. (We still have red moustaches this morning!)

Your description of "three script changes" fooled me into expecting no other blatant "different-reality" messages. Here are a couple you didn't mention: (spoilers follow but hey, it's on DVD already)

Terrorist. That's the name given, in the film, to anyone who uses violence to achieve political change. It matters not if he targets state criminals instead of civilians of a free society. Clearly, [sarcasm alert] if anyone employs such tactics against a state it is proof that the state is corrupt and tyrannical.

St. Mary's mass poisoning, Three Waters chemical attack, subway killings. These three cinematic disasters, ultimately revealed to us as the work of the totalitarian state, are obvious metaphors for 9/11, 3/11 and 7/7. It is left to viewers to make the extremely short journey to the conclusion that Bush (et al) orchestrated these real-world mass killings for the same purpose as Sutler's: To manipulate vox populi in support of the "regime."

You gave the impression that the studio required the script changes, but the actors interviewed in the "making of" bonus material are clearly the "different-reality-enabled" ones:

"I've never seen a Hollywood script that addresses the issues we're talking about today...you know, whether the threat, or the perceived threat, of terrorism or disease or anything else, justifies a diminution in civil liberties," says Stephen Fry. Rupert Graves follows with, "The fear that everybody has about terrorist attacks, and the laws being brought into effect to counter that, sometimes quite oppressive laws, it doesn't take a great leap to understand why and how a state might want a lot more control." Fry ends with, "It's obviously not about America now, or even Britain now, but nonetheless it is about those very issues and it's a marvelous thing to think that Hollywood is, again, able to do that." Let's ask the citizens of northern Israel if the terrorist threat is merely a "perception."

"V is the hero but he's not always good, and he sometimes does things that you can't possibly like because he's vengeful. Because of that it sort of taints his political idealism," says the otherwise delightful Ms. Portman. I suppose she's referring to his campaign to kill all the individuals complicit in his imprisonment and torture, and the murders of countless other victims of medical experiments. Even the ones who "didn't mean it."

"We all know that one man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter," Stephen Fry says. ["If 'everyone knows' such-and-such then it ain't so, by at least ten thousand to one." - Robert A. Heinlein]

I was intrigued by the movie prior to its release, when I saw a theater poster with the quote you cited: "People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people." "How can they screw that up," I thought? Then I noticed it was by the Wachowski brothers, they of 'red pill, blue pill' epistemology. "They should get it right." After release, my sister-in-law saw the movie before us. She thought it would make us mad because, "It is portrayed in such a way that whoever's watching it can see what they want to see." Consequently we declined to contribute 20 bucks to it's creators. (Instead we gave them $16.87 for the DVD. Sigh.)

Give the film credit for being intelligent and thoughtful. It does understand that fear societies are bad. Trouble is, it sees evil in the mirror far more clearly than in, say, religious fanatics with military ordnance.

Three stars.