okay so. that new dracula. ... visually i think it was interesting and pretty, and the music was sometimes compelling, but story-wise this is barely a dracula retelling. the count, jonathan and mina are here, but no one else from the novel. and as mentioned in my previous post, this film's take on mina is very divergent from the original, pulling the "reincarnated wife" shtick, and fundamentally that's all that this movie is about. everything and everyone that is NOT either dracula or mina/elisabeta is just here to speed or slow their reuniting.
now you can make a vampire love story. far be it for my vampirefucker ass to say otherwise. just. make your own movie. make any other movie. it's free to make up your own characters to fuck vampires. they know that, right? let no one ever accuse me of being anti-hot-vampire. the amount of dracfield and devil's minion fic i have read/written should put me on a list. no, my problem in this case is that this is Supposed To Be Dracula, and dracula is not a mina/drac love story. idk i don't have it in me to give the whole spiel about it. gentle reader, treasured follower, you already know what's tiresome and wrong about this. i'll just give a blanket statement that we lost a lot of complexity and intrigue from the novel's story by narrowing the focus so extremely and also narrowing that focus to This. we'll move on.
almost as baffling to me as the reincarnated love arc is that though upwards of 40% of the movie is spent in an asylum (with an even bigger YIKES on the representation of mental illness than you would expect), there is no renfield. this initially surprised me greatly, and then surprised me significantly less when i realized there was no jack, quincy, or van helsing, and only the lacroix of an arthur. what about lucy, you may ask? buddy, i'm going to hold your hand as i break this bizarre news to you, but ... lucy is renfield. or. the woman who's doing the "seductive femme vampire" dance will also be serving your "count-worshiping lunatic in chains" for this evening's production. unheard of character chimeras being birthed in the ultra-streamlining of this plot. honestly, i kind of thought she was fun but mmmm this character was lesser than the sum of her two parts, i think.
and you know...
hm.
you know.
i sat down to write out all my nuanced thoughts on why this was an ineffective but sometimes entertaining movie but i just looked up the director's statements about the film and saw he self-described as "not a fan of dracula" and also said the reincarnation love story was actually the heart of the book, so he never read that thing and doesn't care so post cancelled i'm not spending more time dissecting this than he spent on understanding stoker's novel
best moment was the ending when all the animated gargoyles (never explained) all emerged from the castle transformed into pale, gaunt little boys and wandered away (also never explained). there were just so many of them...