The Creature from the Blog Lagoon

I love Dracula.

Have I mentioned that before?

My affection for Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel is well-documented (both on this blog and off of it), so I won’t put you nice people through the ordeal that is hearing me blather on about it. But believe me, I definitely could.

"…which is why our culture's collective understanding of Van Helsing as a vampire hunter is fundamentally misguided. But anyway, Quincey Morris…"

Suffice to say that when the news broke last year that a new Dracula movie was on the horizon, I was probably one of the few to respond with… well, pretty much anything other than an eye roll.

When I sat down to watch Dracula Untold for the first time, I was genuinely excited. As a rule, movies usually leave me feeling one of three ways – unambiguously entertained, pleasantly surprised, or intrigued by questionable decision-making – and I had a good feeling that this film was going to result in one of the latter two. Instead, the movie did something that very few movies are able to do.

It disappointed me.

Dracula Untold, simply put, is not a good movie. That’s a truth that I was fully prepared to face, and it probably won’t surprise many of you either. But there’s more to it than that, because – and this is what hurts me the most – it didn’t have to be this way. Dracula Untold, as a finished product, is completely forgettable, but it is, at the same time, the first draft of an interesting, engaging, and possibly even great film.

Now, I’m not suggesting that we missed out on a possible new classic of the action horror genre here – as an origin story for one of the most famous and self-explanatory movie monsters of all time, the film was never going to be ‘necessary.’ Still, there’s a definite sense that an ideal version of this movie has something thoughtful and relatively new to say about its subject matter; closing in on two centuries of mainstream vampire fiction, that would have been an achievement in and of itself.

I guess by this point we should get to what the movie is actually about.

Dracula Untold is the story of Vlad Tepes, a former child soldier who served in the Turkish army and grew into a feared warrior, earning the nickname “the Impaler.” Now the ruler of Wallachia, present-day Vlad has put his fighting days behind him, until his childhood-friend-turned-sultan Mehmed II decides that he wants a new batch of soldiers, and demands that Vlad’s subjects hand over their children as tribute. This is unacceptable to Vlad, especially after Mehmed increases his demand to include Vlad’s own son, Rickon Stark.

By far, the most irreplaceable Stark.

Powerless to fight back against the Turkish empire on his own, Vlad comes up with a desperate plan, and makes a bargain with – I kid you not – a local vampire played by Game of Thrones’ Charles Dance (easily the best part of the movie, despite being given sod all to actually do). In a move that he hopes will free him from his imprisonment in a mountain cave, Count Tywin lets Vlad drink his blood, essentially granting our hero a free trial of vampirism. Vlad gets all the familiar powers we’ve come to expect in a creature of the night, but only for three days. The catch? Those new abilities come with a powerful desire to drink human blood, which Vlad must resist if he wants to regain his humanity. If he gives in, the vampirism will become permanent and his maker will go free.

That’s… actually a pretty great hook, even if we can all guess the outcome from the word go. It places a clear deadline on the action, gives our protagonist a fully justified crisis of identity, and ups the stakes (heh) to include not only the fate of Vlad’s people, but of his immortal soul. Mining drama from a premise like that should be a piece of cake.

Sadly, the movie ends up treating drama the way vampires treat garlic; there’s barely a trace of follow through to be found in regard to any of those ideas. Vlad’s actions, which ought to be a constant race against the clock, lack any sense of urgency until literally seconds before his three days are up, and while I’m willing to take it on faith that the writers didn’t skip or add a day anywhere, the audience is never as clearly oriented on the timeline as we should be.

The temptation angle, somehow, is handled even worse. Save for a single moment when he’s distracted by his wife’s neck, good ol’ Vlad is one vampire who doesn’t seem remotely interested in drinking any blood, let alone the blood of his loved ones. Perhaps it’s reluctance on the writers’ part to have their protagonist show weakness, or to waver in his righteous crusade, knowing that the deck is already stacked against him in terms of sympathy. Maybe there was simply no room in the edit for it. Whatever the reason, the unbearable craving that the Master Vampire described – and which offered so much promise – is nowhere to be found, replaced by a halfhearted suggestion, a host suspicious that his houseguest is just being polite. “Are you sure you’re not thirsty? There’s plenty of blood in the fridge. Maybe later?”

Van Helsing says: Ah, yes, here we see the so famous film adage of ‘show, not tell.’ We scientific-minded people of today, we are a cynical lot; we do not believe what we cannot see with our own eyes. It is not enough for us to simply hear that our hero will soon pass through the bitter waters – that will make us fear for them, but the fear must be grounded in the real. If we see that the hero undergo his so-ominous ordeal with no difficulties, or not undergo it at all, our sympathies are lost. We feel that we have been tricked, and may turn our backs on the very film that so dearly needs our investment.

Thank you, Professor.

It’s not often that you’ll hear me asking for a movie to be longer – and make no mistake, Dracula Untold’s breezy, 92-minute runtime is a major point in its favor – but I do feel that this film would have benefitted hugely from having more room to breathe. As it stands, everything from plot to characterization is utterly bare bones, function trumping form all the way down the line. But then, maybe I’m being too harsh. After all, besides the five key players, the film’s supporting cast is jam-packed with such memorable characters as ‘a priest,’ or ‘bearded man that Dracula talks to more than once.’ And really, who could forget ‘kid that the bad guy’s henchman was mean to that one time?’ I know I can’t!

There he is, maybe!

All joking aside, there are enough recurring faces and hints of subplots buried in this film that I truly do want to engage with it on a deeper level. And it wouldn’t have taken much to make that possible. Just give me a handful of scenes in which the characters live their lives. Let them have conversations rather than exchanges of relevant information. Give someone – anyone – a personality that runs deeper than one character trait (or two, in Vlad’s case), and I’d have been sold.

This movie is genuinely filled with cool ideas – Mehmed, knowing that his enemy is a vampire, forces Vlad to fight him in a tent filled with silver coins and mirrors that reflect the sun; that’s cool! – but nobody along the way seemed to realize that cool ideas aren’t enough. What we really need is a reason to care.

Even now, I hold that so many of these flaws could have been forgiven if the film had only managed to nail its thematic arc. Dracula Untold is, first and foremost, the story of a man willing to sacrifice everything for his people; the fact that the main character is Dracula should – if we’re meeting the film on its own terms – be secondary to that. And it’s not only possible, but easy, to pay off that arc while still making room for the character’s ultimate fate. Try this on for size:

Vlad forces Mehmed’s army to retreat and ensures the safety of his subjects, but is unable to save his son, who Mehmed kills out of spite. Enraged, Vlad drinks Mehmed’s blood and lets the demon inside consume him. He almost turns on his people, but the last vestige of his humanity holds him back, and he is successfully driven away, forced to live in exile, feared and hated by those he traded his soul to protect.

Yes, it’s trite, but hey, I made it up on the spot. Broadly speaking, at least, it’s tragic in the right ways, and – if you’ll permit me to bring it up just once – is in keeping with a major theme of the Stoker novel: that it’s possible to fear and hate a monster while still having sympathy for, or even loving, the person that it used to be.

Of course, this movie doesn’t have that ending. Instead, Dracula Untold has Vlad fail to save his people outright: the Turks essentially steamroll them. Vlad drinks his dying wife’s blood – at her own urging, no less, which… you know what that’s going to do to him, right? This isn’t a Popeye/spinach situation – and then turns the few remaining survivors into vampires so that together they can achieve a sort of posthumous revenge.

I’ll say this for that ending: it’s unorthodox, and a lot tougher to pull off, but it still works in theory. In fact, it might be better, since it makes Vlad end on a more villainous note, taking the curse he willingly accepted and forcing it upon others who had no choice in the matter. It also gives him an evil army and keeps him in control of his territory. So, yeah. Kudos on taking the unconventional route.

Except that things don't end there. After achieving his revenge and saving his son (basically the film's only survivor) Vlad immediately – and I mean immediately – kills his vampire spawn all over again because they’re too dangerous to be left alive… er, undead. The film tries to justify this by presenting the newly-made vampires as complete monsters – and Vlad does attempt to kill himself as well, so I can’t cry hypocrite – but their sudden shift is so jarring next to Vlad’s still completely unchanged personality that it only underscores how little attention Dracula Untold pays to its details. If you want to end your movie by turning your protagonist into something inhuman, you have to commit to it. By violating the bodies of those he supposedly loved, and then playing the holier-than-thou card in order to destroy them, Vlad’s final ‘noble act’ is arguably the worst thing he does in the entire film.

Dracula Untold is a movie that clearly wants us to come out of the theater asking ourselves tough questions, like “Can you make yourself a hero by becoming a monster?” or “How far would I go to protect my family?” To its credit, the film does raise those questions, and others, but they’re so clumsily handled that we’re much more likely to come out asking questions the filmmakers never intended. Questions like: “Could you really use a swarm of bats as a bludgeoning weapon?”

I mean, obviously you could weaponize them in the abstract, but smashing them into people? And from the sky, no less! Where does that come from?

OR IS IT?

One final thing, and then I promise I’ll let you go. Even I’m surprised that I managed to go on this long without mentioning that Dracula Untold was intended to kick-start a new shared universe of Universal Monsters reboot films. (Apparently Count Tywin is supposed to be this universe’s Nick Fury, which is a sentence that not only makes sense, but that you understood, because this is an absolutely wonderful time to be alive.) Again, I’m sure that when many of you heard that news – either just now or some time in the past year – your eyes almost rolled themselves out of your skull, but I’m willing to give Universal a complete pass on this one. After all, when you think about it, the Universal Monsters are the OG shared universe. They were doing shared universes before shared universes were cool.

Counterpoint: I dare you to say that this isn't cool.

I’m excited to see what comes out of it, and I hope it leads to some interesting things, unlikely as that may be. The only bad news is that, as far as kicking off a shared universe goes, Dracula Untold is more Man of Steel than Iron Man.

 

Seriously, though, wouldn't you just end up killing all your bats on the first go around? The logistics here are nonexistent.

Un-Bear-able (A Post-Credits Postmortem)

Pixar is in kind of a weird place right now.

While today marks the release of Inside Out (one of my most anticipated films of the year and, it goes without saying, the reason for this blugpost), the last time the once-unimpeachable studio put out a truly great movie was five years ago, with 2010’s Toy Story 3. The three films they’ve put out in the meantime have ranged from pleasant but forgettable, to weirdly mercenary, to downright disappointing.

Can you guess which is which? (HINT: I put them in order.)

It’s a troubling pattern, but the public at large – myself included – is extremely resistant to recognizing it as one. I’m going to see Inside Out today, and despite a full half-decade of evidence staring me in the face, I’m not even considering the possibility that it will be bad. Is that a problem? I really don’t know. My own philosophy involves looking for the good in every movie I see, but it’s definitely dangerous for any studio – especially one with such high standards to live up to – to be given what is basically a lifetime pass. And nowhere do I see that happening more clearly than in the reception to Pixar’s last original feature, Brave.

I really dislike Brave. Like, a lot. I think it’s a failure of storytelling on just about every level. (And this is coming from the guy who called Transformers “a perfectly capable and enjoyable movie,” so you know that’s not an accusation I throw around lightly.) I don’t know if I hold the minority opinion when I call the film a disappointment, or if I just happen to have a lot of friends with similar taste, but I can tell that it definitely isn’t the consensus.

It boggles my mind that the Academy would say that a film like Brave was the Best Animated Feature of 2012. To this day, it’s one of only two Oscar wins I still hold a grudge about. Sure, the movie has the whole feminism angle going for it (which, before I get myself into trouble, I’ll say is a refreshing change of pace), but did any of the voters actually watch all the nominees? Or, you know, any of them? That year wasn’t even a particularly weak field. It’s essentially proof that Pixar can now be an award contender just by showing up. Either that, or everyone was really impressed by how poofy Merida’s hair was.

Look at that. You won't find hair that poofy in Wreck-It Ralph. Just try.

So, even if it’s coming far too late to do anyone any good, I want to use today as an opportunity to share my dissenting opinion about this film, and perhaps make you rethink your own. Consider this a clearing of the palate as Pixar begins its climb back to the top, in the hopes that they don’t forget what they’ve left behind at the bottom.

First things first, we’ll look at a concept that’s applicable to more movies than just this one. This is blog is supposed to be vaguely educational, after all.

The phrase ‘Chekhov’s Gun’ has become a pretty well-known term, but for those who aren’t completely in the know, it refers to a pretty basic idea of storytelling: anytime something is pointed out to the audience, the writer is making a promise, namely that the information they showed us is important. Our end of the deal, therefore, is to remember it, and when a story doesn’t deliver on its end of that promise, the audience can get justifiably upset. Don’t put a loaded gun in the room if it isn’t going to go off, or at least get pointed at somebody. Couldn’t be simpler.

Brave, of course, fails at this completely.

The film’s entire first act – which I’ll be the first to admit is actually excellent – hinges on Merida’s love of archery. The first moment we’re shown of her life is the day that she’s given her first bow. When she goes out riding, it doubles as target practice. In the film’s best scene, when Merida defies custom and makes her first attempt at shaping her own future, archery is the vehicle she chooses. Every moment of Brave’s first half hour paints Merida as a strong-willed young woman with an unorthodox hobby that she will not apologize for, something that makes her far more interesting than your average princess. Even better? She’s really good at it! She’s so good, in fact, that she pulls a Robin Hood, splitting one of her opponent’s arrows in half, all the way down the middle, on the first try. A feat like that is, at the very least, mathematically impossible.

Many Mythbusters died to bring us this information.

This is all great from a storytelling standpoint. The character has a passion, and that passion gets her into trouble. It feels satisfying, simply because the problems that arise are unique to Merida and what we know about her. Plenty of teenage girls get in trouble with their mothers. I imagine that very few get in trouble with their mothers because they outperformed all of their potential fiancés in an archery contest and upset the power structure of an entire Scottish kingdom.

But then Merida turns her mother into a bear. And all of a sudden, for some utterly inexplicable reason, that becomes the thing that this movie is about, consuming every bright spot the film had going for it. From that moment on, Merida’s character becomes that of… a girl whose mother is a bear. Her desires haven’t changed – though she now has the added goal of making her mother not be a bear – but her traits rapidly start to fall away. Where’s the stubbornness? Where’s the desire for adventure? They’re all abandoned in favor of some vague need to ‘mend the bond’ – itself an arbitrary task assigned to the pair by the unnamed witch, who I’ve taken to calling ‘Diane X. Machina.’

But let’s get back to archery and the idea of Chekhov’s Gun. Once Elinor undergoes her transformation, Merida will only fire six more arrows before the film is done. One is used to catch a fish, a task that Merida is shown minutes later to be able to do with her bare hands. Four more are shot at the villainous bear Mor’du, but he shrugs them off like mosquito bites. So far, this integral ability isn’t feeling very essential, is it?

Arrow number six certainly serves a purpose – used to knock a sword out of King Fergus’ hand before he unknowingly kills his own wife – but the film doesn’t play the moment as if it were a pay-off to anything. It’s just kind of cool. During the actual climax, Mor’du is defeated when Elinor slams him against a large stone, which then falls and crushes him. That checks out – fight fire with fire and bears with bears – but wouldn’t it be nice if Merida, you know, contributed? Suppose the stone cracks, just as it does in the film, but rather than gravity, it’s Merida who makes it fall, by dislodging the exact right bit of rubble with a well-placed arrow. Isn’t that so much more satisfying? As it stands now, our main character’s favorite hobby and most significant skill plays no role whatsoever in the resolution of the plot, which goes a long way towards explaining why the film leaves such a bad taste in my mouth. It’s Chekhov’s Bow, and it most definitely goes unfired.

Also sadly unfired? The character designer responsible for this walking headache.

Speaking of applicable lessons, loyal readers may remember my write-up of Cars 2 from two summers ago. (New readers can just click here. Or don’t. I’m easy.) In that post, I argued that Cars 2 wasn’t a bad movie, but that it suffered from an overblown premise and a counterproductive moral: “Don’t change, because you’re already perfect.” And yet, whatever else you might say about Cars 2, and however snarkily you might say it, at least Mater learned something that he could apply to his life at large.

The moral of Brave, by contrast, is “Your mom loves you, so don’t turn her into a bear… unless it’s over something really, really important.”

Yes, the movie features a broader theme of mother and daughter learning to respect one another – I’m not a complete idiot – but if you actually examine the film, you’ll find that we aren’t given any scenes in which that happens outside the context of their immediate situation. Elinor learns that it’s important to be able to survive outside the luxury of a castle (but only if you’re a bear), and Merida learns that it’s important to know domestic skills like sewing (but only if you’ve accidentally changed your mom into a bear). Every bit of growth the characters undergo is solely in service of solving their current problem, and the film gets so overwhelmed by the bear twist that the pair’s reconciliation at the end feels like little more than a nice coincidence.

It’s easy not to realize it in the heat of the moment, but there is absolutely no point of connection between the plot of this film and its supposed emotional stakes. Things are resolved in the end – presumably because that’s what’s supposed to happen – but any real consideration of why it all works out the way it does brings about some pretty dark implications. The absurdity of Brave’s turn into Brother Bear territory is made all the worse by one awful, awful fact, namely that Merida’s plan to poison and manipulate her mother ends up doing exactly what she wanted it to.

Basically, it goes like this: Merida doesn’t want to get married, is told by her mother that she has to get married, changes her mother into a bear, changes her mother back into a human, and is told by her mother that she doesn’t have to get married. I just watched the movie again this morning. I promise I am not leaving out any steps.

That’s right, kids: even your parents can be fixed by turning them off and then on again.

The pivotal scene in which Elinor has her change of heart as Merida distracts the crowd is… fine, I guess. If pressed, I might even call it enjoyable, and the moment itself is played very nicely, with Merida ending up genuinely surprised by the words she’s speaking on her mother’s behalf. The trouble is that it all comes out of nowhere. Virtually nothing about their relationship has changed, and certainly not in regard to the issue of Merida’s marriage. But Merida is rewarded anyway, maybe because Elinor sees that she’s a pretty good public speaker? I couldn’t tell you. Either way, the whole thing reeks of a missed opportunity; Merida complains time and again that she could convince her mother that she’s right if only the queen would listen. Now, here Elinor sits, as captive an audience as she will ever be, and rather than make her case, Merida decides to talk about the power of friendship. It’s all very confusing.

I think the hole the writers dug themselves into here was crafting the story in such a way that Merida is completely in the right – can you imagine if she still had to marry Wee Dingwall in the end? – but pursues her desires in a way that demands some sort of retribution. You change someone into an animal, that’s no bueno. At the very least, you need to become an animal yourself. This is basic Arabian Nights stuff. (Or Emperor’s New Groove stuff. Take your pick.) Ultimately, though, Merida can’t be punished, because the argument between her and her mother is pretty black and white: either she gets married or she doesn’t. Unless Brave wants to take a stance in favor of arranged marriages – which I’ll admit would be a bold move – Elinor has to be the one to concede. That all adds up to only one possible outcome: the queen is forced to undergo a horrible and traumatic experience, and then essentially apologizes to the person who did it to her. If Merida were a man – or anybody besides Elinor’s daughter, for that matter – this would be all kinds of messed up. Even as it stands now, the princess doesn’t come out of the movie looking very good.

Why, then, do I seem to be the only one who noticed any of this? It’s the emotional disconnect I mentioned. Brave is so caught up in the machinations of its plot that the characters stop mattering. They’re basically just cogs, being led by the hand from one objective to the next until the story resolves itself. It’s not really Merida’s fault that Elinor became a bear. She just did what the witch told her to! And it’s not like she went looking for the witch, either. The Whisps led her there! Blame them!

Oh, I do. Believe me, I do.

Brave’s use of Will-o’-the-Whisps is the element that finally broke me. They are literally a dotted line connecting the film from scene to scene, foregoing any pretense of cause and effect. It utterly fails the Parker/Stone 'therefore' test, that's for sure. Would Merida have known about Diane X. Machina’s cottage if the Whisps hadn’t shown her the way? Of course not. But she had to get that bear spell from somewhere! Would Merida and Elinor have had any conceivable reason to visit Mor’du’s castle if they hadn’t been led there? Nope! But they still hadn’t figured out what ‘mend the bond’ meant, so fire up that trail of breadcrumbs!

The Whisps are an implicit admission from the writers that the characters would never do any of what they’re doing unless instructed, and that they couldn't be bothered to come up with a better alternative. Pixar movies are so widely lauded because every single thing that happens in them is driven by character - their fears, their desires, their relationships. But in using the Whisps like it does, Brave completely robs Merida and Elinor of their agency. They follow the glowy lights not because they want to, but because they're magic, and because they know their fate (read: the next plot point) will be waiting for them at the end. King Fergus is easily my favorite character in this movie, and only in writing this post did I realize the reason why: he’s basically the only character whose actions are consistently informed by his personality. Meanwhile, our two heroines are reduced to video game protagonists by the film’s end, rushing to do the thing the movie told them to do, but only so that they can undo the thing that Merida did, which she only did because the movie told her to. It’s an ouroboros of motivation, and not in a good way.

So there you go. Upon rewatch, maybe I am being just a bit too hard on this movie; it’s not like there aren’t hundreds of other films out there with similar flaws, and many of those are probably films I have an affection for. But to see a studio like Pixar make so many rookie mistakes, and to have those mistakes go completely unrecognized by the majority of audiences – it hurts. I just want Pixar to be great again, instead of only being told that they are. I can only hope that when I go to the movies tonight, I’ll get my wish.

I have a feeling I will.

Honestly, though? Give Brother Bear another try. It's underrated.