A movie review by Father
Scott Archer
October 20, 2014
When I went to see Dracula Untold, a movie directed by Gary
Shore and with Luke Evans (The Hobbit:
The Desolation of Smaug) in the title role, I thought I was going to see an
origin story, but it is, in fact, attempting to pass as “the true story behind
the story you thought you knew.” This was apparent when I realized the audience
is supposed to admire Vlad Tepes’ choice to become a vampire and root for him
after he becomes one. As a story, Dracula
Untold fails miserably.
The key ingredient in the
behind the scenes story of a misunderstood hero is showing the audience that
they have not been told the true story in the first place; that the choices you
thought the villain made were not actually made, and the character is redeemed
in a very clever way. In this way, the audience still gets a “good vs. evil”
tale, yet not in the way expected, while allowing the audience to cheer for the
character once thought to be the villain. This was very successfully done, for
example, in the movie Maleficent
(2014), where, even when the choice of vengeance was made, there was repentance
and redemption in the end.
The character of Dracula has
been used as a classic good versus evil tale, with good triumphant in the end;
however, in this retelling, Vlad Tepes (Dracula) makes the choices you expect
him to make, which are bad, evil choices. The writers and director try to
convince us that these choices are made for good and noble causes, but therein
lies the problem. The end can never justify the means. In a tale of a
misunderstood hero, the choices must be different. In the aforementioned
example of Maleficent we were given
the believable and cleverly written premise that her story was never told
properly. This is not the case with Dracula
Untold.
Vlad still intentionally
chooses to become a vampire. Yet, we are supposed to believe he is sacrificing
himself to save his country. He continues to make the wrong choices when he has
the chance to redeem himself; he instead chooses to make his vampirism
permanent by killing his beloved wife. The choice to convince the audience to
root for a character who is clearly evil was also a bad one. It makes no difference
why he became a vampire. The truth is, he chooses the wrong path, no matter the
reason, and the writers and director clearly wanted the audience to support
him.
Do we even want Dracula to be
a hero? No! We want him to fall in defeat at the hands of someone like Van
Helsing. We want… no… we need to have
good triumph over evil. In our relativistic world a story about evil versus
evil should not come as a surprise, but that does not make it a good story.
This movie sought to rehabilitate a monster who cannot not be rehabilitated.
However, this story failed in so many other ways.
This is a CGI movie on
steroids if ever there was one, and I had the impression that I was watching a
video game most of the time. The costuming is the typical medieval-fantasy-Ren
fair variety, but I am convinced that the fur-collared coat worn by Vlad is the
same one worn by Luke Evans as Bard the Bowman in The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. The score by Ramin Djawadi (Iron Man, Game of Thrones) is
unmemorable and adds nothing to support the movie in any significant way. The
best thing I can say about this movie is that everyone’s hair, for a movie set
in fifteenth-century Transylvania, is very clean and perfectly coifed!
Dracula Untold
is simply a story that should have remained untold.
