Movie review: Dracula Untold
I’m behind the times. So sue me.
Finally got around to Dracula Untold. Approached it without much enthusiasm, low expectations. 2nd tier Orlando Bloom did about as good a job as you’d expect from the guy who looks like the guy who plays Legolas – he was OK. Charles Dance classes up any movie, so there’s a high point.
The history is all wrong, wrong, wrong. That’s an annoyance. I thought the whole enterprise was weird, though. First, we want to have a vampire who isn’t really evil. Story-telling wise, the moral conflicts added some much needed tension to the otherwise not-that-interesting story arc.
Here’s the problem: our expectations have gotten really high. We aren’t impressed with turning into smoke or moving kinda fast. We’re not impressed with pretty fangs and frock coats. The movie turned Dracula into a superhero.
He can fly. He morphs into a cloud of bats that can fly faster than bats, and can also do other handy things – like turn into God’s Fist. In his first scene as a vampire confronting an army, he wipes out the whole army, by himself, in a few seconds.
Go back and watch the old Conan movies. Arnie was so huge, the directors had a hard time presenting him with and serious challenges. They had to resort to football players and basketball players to find people who existed on his scale. At the end of Destroyer, he fights a costumed Andre the Giant.
The Superman franchise jumped the shark a long time ago. In the 40’s, he beat up mob bosses and jumped over cars. Now he throws continents into space and bullet bounce off his eyeballs.
Whatever.
No realistic threats. No limitations. Snooze.
The thing is, really the only threat to Dracula, once he meets the ex-machina Charles Dance Master Vampire in a cave, is the moral question: he’ll have to do some unpleasant things to protect his people. That could have been played much stronger. But it wasn’t. In the end, his Turkish enemy inexplicably manages to sneak into the castle while Dracula is distracted fighting the army. Equally inexplicably, his mortal enemy seems to know what vampires are and that they don’t like silver. These things are corrections to the godlike power given the title character which itself covers up for poor story telling with spectacle.
There is some spectacle. Almost-Orlando-Bloom is almost as pretty at Orlando Bloom; he looks pretty good in his armor. The special effects are OK, if you’re into that kind of thing. But I just couldn’t maintain serious interest in this film.
Finally got around to Dracula Untold. Approached it without much enthusiasm, low expectations. 2nd tier Orlando Bloom did about as good a job as you’d expect from the guy who looks like the guy who plays Legolas – he was OK. Charles Dance classes up any movie, so there’s a high point.
The history is all wrong, wrong, wrong. That’s an annoyance. I thought the whole enterprise was weird, though. First, we want to have a vampire who isn’t really evil. Story-telling wise, the moral conflicts added some much needed tension to the otherwise not-that-interesting story arc.
Here’s the problem: our expectations have gotten really high. We aren’t impressed with turning into smoke or moving kinda fast. We’re not impressed with pretty fangs and frock coats. The movie turned Dracula into a superhero.
He can fly. He morphs into a cloud of bats that can fly faster than bats, and can also do other handy things – like turn into God’s Fist. In his first scene as a vampire confronting an army, he wipes out the whole army, by himself, in a few seconds.
Go back and watch the old Conan movies. Arnie was so huge, the directors had a hard time presenting him with and serious challenges. They had to resort to football players and basketball players to find people who existed on his scale. At the end of Destroyer, he fights a costumed Andre the Giant.
The Superman franchise jumped the shark a long time ago. In the 40’s, he beat up mob bosses and jumped over cars. Now he throws continents into space and bullet bounce off his eyeballs.
Whatever.
No realistic threats. No limitations. Snooze.
The thing is, really the only threat to Dracula, once he meets the ex-machina Charles Dance Master Vampire in a cave, is the moral question: he’ll have to do some unpleasant things to protect his people. That could have been played much stronger. But it wasn’t. In the end, his Turkish enemy inexplicably manages to sneak into the castle while Dracula is distracted fighting the army. Equally inexplicably, his mortal enemy seems to know what vampires are and that they don’t like silver. These things are corrections to the godlike power given the title character which itself covers up for poor story telling with spectacle.
There is some spectacle. Almost-Orlando-Bloom is almost as pretty at Orlando Bloom; he looks pretty good in his armor. The special effects are OK, if you’re into that kind of thing. But I just couldn’t maintain serious interest in this film.
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