Key Points
V's sacrifice for his ideals show the general populace that they do not need to fear their government if they are united together, as can be seen in the finale of the film as the people storm Parliament, dressed in Guy Fawkes outfits, and the armed forces do nothing to stop them. It is this sentimental scene that summarizes the ideas and concepts in the film, but was not present in the graphic novel. While
one could argue that this scene indicates easier access for an audience, it suits the shift in viewpoint from the comic, which is on a more personal, human basis with the undercurrent of the political ideologies rather than the outright, cold political agenda of the graphic novel (Reynolds, 2009).
Despite claims that graphic novels need more active participation in developing the story, the Wachowskis achieve a similar effect through their trademark use of special effects. In shifting the participation from the spaces between images in graphic novels to special effects, which have been found to "stimulate the spectator intellectually by connecting text with context, image with
apparatus" (North, 2005), the Wachowskis use their stylistic decisions to translate the participatory aspects of comics into a different form. So while the structures of the graphic novel and film are not the same, they do require the viewer to engage their minds, which coincides with the Wachowskis' desire to eliminate the absent audience, and they are able to achieve that through style and adapting the structure of the original text into something new but with a similar result.