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.