DVD Release
V (1983)
R1 / NTSC DVD
Warner Home Video / 2001
Directed by: Kenneth Johnson
Written by: Kenneth Johnson
Cast: Jane Badler, Michael Durrell, Faye Grant, Marc Singer, Robert Englund
Review by Vaughn Drake
All over the world giant UFOs appeared over the greatest cities of each nation and hovered silent, and aloof. All attempts to communicate or attack the UFOs have failed. Then all of a sudden, the crafts spoke to each city in that cities native tongue: We come in peace. It was official; off planet life and intelligence had been proven and humanity has been visited. Now the pressing questions had to be asked: what did they look like and what did they want?
Told as a very thinly veiled analogy of Nazi occupation during WWII, it follows the exploits of a diverse group of humans intend on understanding the visitors, working to profit from the visitors, those battling and stymieing the visitors, and those chronicling the visitors.
The opening thirty minutes was masterfully crafted and my hat is off to Kenneth Johnson and his crew for the work they accomplished. The tension is almost unbearable and it’s rare that cinema is this well done, and even rarer to see it created for a TV audience.
Running the gamut from amazing FX to laughably bad, thankfully V was more a story about what such a visitation would have on the people of Earth, than on a technological showcase of SFX. It holds up incredibly well after a quarter of a century, and should be able to be enjoyed by everyone. Because this was the first part in, what was to be, a long line of made for TV movies, there is no real cut-and-dry ending, which may turn some people off. V was followed by V: The Final Battle (writer / director Kenneth Johnson didn’t direct it, and used a pseudonym for his writing credit), so if you can need a bit of closure, you can watch it, but it’s not needed.
I wish I could say I enjoy sci-fi movies to the extent I enjoy V, but other than 2001: A Space Odyssey, I can’t. I was spellbound by V as a kid, and unlike so many of my childhood favorites, this one still holds water. While many other alien invasion movies have been filmed, with much, much larger budgets V still stands above them all because V was more about the story, rather than the special effects. The story itself is timeless, and I hope everyone gives it a chance.
