I saw Dracula Untold yesterday. There were some parts of it I liked. Luke Evans is a charismatic actor with an interesting face. The acting overall was perhaps a cut above the norm for a modern vampire movie, of which genre I have quite low expectations. Special effects were quite appealing. Costuming was good, albeit no better than your average episode of Game of Thrones. Additionally, the movie showed a (very) little more of the real history behind the historical Vlad Dracula than I had expected to see. It portrays a highly fictionalized but not completely unrecognizable portrait of the man who became a Romanian national hero. Therein lies a piece of the problem I had with this film.
SPOILERS AHEAD (if you've seen the trailers, you will know some but not all of this already)
As Dracula Untold begins, Vlad is a man with great evil in his past. He has already impaled many thousands. However, like William Munny in Unforgiven, he has attempted to redeem himself, the love of a good woman and of the son they have raised having helped him to keep his past violence safely in the past. He's a changed man, serving as a protector to his people, shielding them from harm. One of the ways in which he does this is to pay tribute to the Ottoman Empire, in which he was a hostage in his youth.
However, when the emissaries of Sultan Mehmed II show up, they demand a tribute of more than just money. They demand a tribute of 1000 young boys to serve as Janissary troops for the Ottomans, and specifically include Vlad's own son as one of this tithe. Apparently Vlad had promised his wife he would never allow his son to be taken as he was. It is at this point that Vlad rebels.
After singlehandedly killing the Ottoman delegation, Vlad is faced with the fact that his forces are insufficient to withstand the might of the armies commanded by Mehmed.
So he seeks out a demon-possessed creature in a cave he has good reason to know has killed Turkish scouts in the hope this creature will give him the strength he needs. For its own reasons, which include the desire to bring Vlad to evil, it agrees, telling him he will have a vampire's powers for three days and nights. If he can refrain from drinking blood during this time, he will then return to full humanity. If he cannot, he will forever fall and be doomed to be this elder vampire's pawn. Also, it will be free of the curse that binds it to the cave. These terms sound good enough for Vlad to agree.
Vlad does manage to resist the bloodlust, although this part of the movie was definitely underwritten. He also kills a lot of Turks in very cinematic fashion. However, notwithstanding his great powers he is unable to kill sufficient Turks to stop them from routing his forces, taking his son, and killing his wife. As the sun is rising on the day that will restore him to humanity, his dying wife begs him to drink her blood to save their son. He does so, irrevocably sealing his own fate as a vampire. He then "converts" a number of his defeated and vengeful people, many of them dying, into vampires eager to drink the blood of the Ottoman army.
Vlad summons storm clouds to block out the sun and he and his minions destroy the massive army of Mehmed. Vlad seeks for his son and finds him in Mehmed's tent. The Sultan, no fool and at least somewhat informed about what he may face, has prepared himself by coating the floor of the tent in tribute coins. Silver ones. Mehmed also has a silver sword. There is a big fight, again mostly with swords. Vlad wins, although it's rather difficult to see him at this point as the plucky underdog. He kills Mehmed, drinking his blood, and then frees his son.
At this point, the other vampires demand his son's death and Vlad, too late, realizes there is no humanity left in them. So turns his son over to a purehearted monk who has somehow survived the battle and then parts the storm clouds, allowing the sun to do its work on them and on him.
Vlad Dracula is believed to be dead but is, in fact, very much undead, having been revived by a Renfield-like figure who drips blood onto his withered corpse. The last and least part of the film is a very brief postscript set in a modern city, showing Vlad wooing a woman who would appear to be the reincarnation of his long dead wife. The master demon/vampire also makes an appearance in a business suit, muttering something relatively meaningless aside from indicating the fact that some sort of sequel is planned.
Before we get to that postscript, however, we do see Vlad's young son son assuming the throne in a scene containing a voiceover talking about how the Turks had been prevented from taking over Europe.
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Critique:
Some of the above was moderately entertaining to watch, considered purely as visual entertainment and for the reasons listed in the first paragraph. However, I was keenly aware throughout that I was watching a fairly full-throated defense of "the ends justify the means" morality. Nowhere is a viable alternative presented. Within the world framed by the film, Vlad has no other real choices, other than turning over his own son and breaking his promise to his wife. He must turn to evil methods to save his people and his family from the Turks. Even his past impalement of enemies is presented as a virtuous action in disguise. His claim (in the movie) was that every village he had impaled saved ten others, who were thereby intimidated and dissuaded from rebellion.
Frank Miller's movie 300 exalted the actions of the Spartans at Thermopylae who fought to the death against a [grossly misrepresented] Xerxes and his Persian forces. Historically and artistically speaking, that film was almost a joke, except that it wasn't because it was a huge commercial hit and had a real and actual impact on Italian national politics, diplomatic relations with Iran, and American pop culture. One of my female friends summed the whole thing up with the three word review "blood and tits". But regardless of the fact that the historic Spartans were monstrous by modern standards in many ways and regardless of the inaccuracies in that movie, it is at least true that fighting to the death in defense of one's country against a foreign invader would generally be considered praiseworthy by most Americans and, I would guess, most readers at Daily Kos. I didn't see the sequel, 300: Rise of an Empire, but have been given to understand it was more of the same. Now, though, we have Dracula Untold exalting deals with the devil, mass impalements, and vampirism against the threat posed by the Ottoman Empire. I don't think you would have to believe in a devil or vampires or any supernatural power(s) whatsoever to think that takes it to another level entirely and that the common thread of xenophobia against the peoples of Asia Minor is hard to miss. Before this last movie, I just put it down to Frank Miller being Frank Miller. Now I suppose I have to accept that these movies accurately reflect one facet of the zeitgeist of modern America, but I don't have to approve this trend. And I don't.