One Monday, at the bus, Dracula Untold was playing. Unlike the other times, it was harder to ignore this because the headrest of the seat beside me was not high enough to hide the screen from my line of sight, even when I purposely tried to ignore it by putting on my earbuds and playing my iPod loud enough to drown out the volume.
But of course one cannot simply control the instinct of one's eyes to a moving object, and I occasionally find myself taking a peek, and there were four key scenes that I got to take in.
But first, the positives:
I'm comparing this chiefly to another Dracula biopic that has a similar concept, and visually, Dracula Untold looks good, as good as a film Universal can come up with. Fabulous Costume Porn that obviously lends some Artistic License as well as fantastic Scenery Porn. I might complain about the Conspicuous CGI, but every film nowadays has Conspicuous CGI anyway, even the good ones, so I'll let this one go. Besides, its version of Vein-o-Vision is pretty cool. The cast is good. Charles Dance is delightfully Hammy as the vampire who infected Vlad, and so is Dominic Cooper as Mehmed. I might have appreciated it if Vlad's wife was a brunette instead of a blonde; I've read somewhere that Romanians typically have Raven Hair, Ivory Skin. In the region, fair hair is attributed to Poles and Germanic minorities. I later find out that she was blonde on purpose because the epilogue has her reincarnated as Mina Murray (Harker), who was blonde in the novel. This is obviously a nod to Coppola's 1992 adaptation.
Dark Prince: The True Story of Dracula (2000) is not a great film as it suffered from mediocre acting and Soundtrack Dissonance, but it was heaps better than Dracula Untold in delivering a story about Vlad the Impaler. Dark Prince obviously had limited resources, so they had to resort to Pragmatic Adaptation/Adaptation Distillation to make it work with the concept. More on this in a moment. In contrast, Dracula Untold heavily embellishes the story with lots of Shout-Outs to Hollywood Vampire lore that aren't even in Bram Stoker's novel to begin with.
To be fair, I didn't pay attention to Dracula Untold because I know going in that it's not worth my attention. The first time I glimpsed this movie was at a bus, and the first scene was the drawn-out opening with Vlad's voiceover about his boyhood as a hostage of the sultan. When I first saw this years ago, it destroyed any chance that I might give this film. Obviously borrowing the aesthetics of 300, it shows two boys at a bloody duel while being whipped by their Turkish masters. Nothing could be more wrong. While the Ottomans did kidnap the sons of their European vassals, the boys were treated like the princes that they were because the objective was to enamor them to the Ottomans and indoctrinate them into the culture so that they would eventually return home and rule as Muslim vassals. While I have little sympathy for the Ottomans, it came off insulting to portray them this way. It showed little of the political cleverness of indoctrinating European aristocrats and slaves who were victimized by the Church, which was not a friendly place in the 15th century. Giving Vlad Dracula a Freudian Excuse like this is pretty damn shallow IMO as opposed to the treatment in Dark Prince where it took his willpower to not succumb to indoctrination and the love for his father and grandfather's legacy to not hand over Romania to the Ottoman Empire.
You see, what I loved about Dark Prince was that it showed Vlad III the way Romanians saw him. That for all his questionable (for soft modern people) actions, he did what he could to protect Europe, its culture, and Christendom. While it does play with vampirism, it does derive from Slavic lore rather than Stoker's imagination. In the Slavic region, vampirism is a fall from divine grace, so in that movie, Vlad's wife becomes a vampire because she killed herself; Vlad became a vampire because he was kicked out of the Church. But the story as a whole does not highlight vampirism but only teases it at the beginning and end of the movie to amuse fans of vampire fiction.
Dracula Untold, as you know, puts vampirism on the forefront of the story. And from the trailers and synopses alone, it is implied that Dracula was a successful voivode because he was a vampire. This is insulting; it's like saying that the pyramids were built by aliens, that in the millennia prior to the Industrial Revolution, there's no way that people can achieve magnificent feats by human grit and ingenuity.
It gets worse each time I glance at the screen. It had Vlad dodging the sun like fucking Edward Cullen. NO, UNIVERSAL. This isn't Underworld. This isn't Anne Rice. This is Dracula. Dracula can walk into the sun, but it weakens him and makes him vulnerable. I know Dracula got the "burn in the sun" treatment before, but it made me indignant to see VLAD THE IMPALER looking SCARED of the sun and dodging questions from his wife and his allies like he's Spider-Man.
I gave up at this point and closed my eyes and tried to sleep with my screams playlist on. I was so angry. Now I want to watch Dark Prince again. I'm glad it's still on YouTube.
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