Van Helsing
May. 18th, 2004 09:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lederhosenRegular movies have credits. This one has debits.
After the mandatory spot of biffo with no relevance to the rest of the story - a device common to James Bond films, and foreshadowing the 'Q branch' rip-off soon to follow - our hero is told the basic premise of the movie: the Valerious family have been trapped in Purgatory for nine generations, only to be released when Dracula is slain.
According to IMDB the running time of this movie is only 132 minutes, but it certainly felt like nine generations of torment. The self-similarity of the movie doesn't stop there, either; it's patched together from the corpses of half a dozen better movies combined with a bit of green computerised crap, very much like Frankenstein's monster (which they call 'Frankenstein', something any horror movie buff would consider a hanging offence), and the result is just as unappealing.
Good things about this movie: Kate Beckinsale's wardrobe.
Jackman, Beckinsale, Wenham and Roxburgh aren't really *bad*, and they make a valiant effort, but you can only sculpt so much out of crap before it dribbles through your fingers again.
Bad things about this movie: Crappy CGI. Rampant stupidity.
Item: Carl invents a device that releases a burst of high-power daylight, and it takes an HOUR AND A HALF before anybody figures out how this might be of some use when dealing with vampires.
Item: Dracula, knowing that only a werewolf can kill him (no reason is ever offered for this), 'protects' himself by keeping ONE SYRINGE of anti-werewolf serum in a tower. Maybe it's just me, but I'd be carrying a silver dagger and a gun loaded with silver bullets instead.
Item: Van Helsing gets bitten by a werewolf during the full moon. After no more than a day or two of mucking about, Our Heroes gallop off to... Budapest? Somewhere or other. And suddenly we're told that it's only two days to the full moon, so their journey must have taken a good three weeks. Then they gallop all the way back again, just in time for the full moon.
Item: Dracula's idiot brides, who can be guaranteed upon to toy with their prey until help arrives or old age takes them, whichever happens first, even after one of them dies of this. Anna even comments on the rampant stupidity of this.
Item: Dracula's minions, which can only be described as 'Ewoks with gasmasks'.
And more, but I won't waste more breath on this mush. All you need to know is that it's not worth seeing. Maybe to mock when it comes on TV, but even that's pushing it.
(And in case anybody's wondering... yes, I was warned by reviews, but somehow it ended up being a Family Thing To Do Together. Come to think of it, this is also how I ended up seeing LoEG and 'Mission To Mars'.)
After the mandatory spot of biffo with no relevance to the rest of the story - a device common to James Bond films, and foreshadowing the 'Q branch' rip-off soon to follow - our hero is told the basic premise of the movie: the Valerious family have been trapped in Purgatory for nine generations, only to be released when Dracula is slain.
According to IMDB the running time of this movie is only 132 minutes, but it certainly felt like nine generations of torment. The self-similarity of the movie doesn't stop there, either; it's patched together from the corpses of half a dozen better movies combined with a bit of green computerised crap, very much like Frankenstein's monster (which they call 'Frankenstein', something any horror movie buff would consider a hanging offence), and the result is just as unappealing.
Good things about this movie: Kate Beckinsale's wardrobe.
Jackman, Beckinsale, Wenham and Roxburgh aren't really *bad*, and they make a valiant effort, but you can only sculpt so much out of crap before it dribbles through your fingers again.
Bad things about this movie: Crappy CGI. Rampant stupidity.
Item: Carl invents a device that releases a burst of high-power daylight, and it takes an HOUR AND A HALF before anybody figures out how this might be of some use when dealing with vampires.
Item: Dracula, knowing that only a werewolf can kill him (no reason is ever offered for this), 'protects' himself by keeping ONE SYRINGE of anti-werewolf serum in a tower. Maybe it's just me, but I'd be carrying a silver dagger and a gun loaded with silver bullets instead.
Item: Van Helsing gets bitten by a werewolf during the full moon. After no more than a day or two of mucking about, Our Heroes gallop off to... Budapest? Somewhere or other. And suddenly we're told that it's only two days to the full moon, so their journey must have taken a good three weeks. Then they gallop all the way back again, just in time for the full moon.
Item: Dracula's idiot brides, who can be guaranteed upon to toy with their prey until help arrives or old age takes them, whichever happens first, even after one of them dies of this. Anna even comments on the rampant stupidity of this.
Item: Dracula's minions, which can only be described as 'Ewoks with gasmasks'.
And more, but I won't waste more breath on this mush. All you need to know is that it's not worth seeing. Maybe to mock when it comes on TV, but even that's pushing it.
(And in case anybody's wondering... yes, I was warned by reviews, but somehow it ended up being a Family Thing To Do Together. Come to think of it, this is also how I ended up seeing LoEG and 'Mission To Mars'.)
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no subject
Date: 2004-05-18 05:42 am (UTC)I say 'nup'. No-one, and I mean _NO-ONE_ wears suede boots in snow *sheesh*.
And....you say, 'Bad things about this movie: Crappy CGI. Rampant stupidity.'
I say, re: the 'rampant stupidity' bit, see my comment above about the boots! (the CGI speaks for itself, but I will add.....when a village has been plagued by vampires for 9 generations, why do all the villagers _go outside_ to watch them swarm?)
no subject
Date: 2004-05-18 03:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-05-18 05:51 am (UTC)My reaction to them was that they were bastard children of Ewoks and Jawas.
no subject
Date: 2004-05-18 05:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-05-18 07:32 am (UTC)The multiple opportunities to scream "how stupid can you be?!" at the screen.
Seriously, how can you not see this?
(...on DVD with a likeminded group of people and quantities of booze.)
And thanks for the laughs.
no subject
Date: 2004-05-18 08:18 am (UTC)Once again, trusting my instincts more than newsprint critics has paid off, big time. No money/life wastey for me!
no subject
Date: 2004-05-18 07:00 pm (UTC)"Van Helsing" is a Stephen Sommers film, which meant it was automatically going to be a dumb B movie with a cavalier attitude to the source material. (Fair enough, as the Universal horror movies of the 1930s/40s were absolutely shocking at maintaining any sort of consistency and were fairly low in intelligence.) It appears to be exactly what it set out to be.
"Troy" had a prestigious director and trampled all over the source material, which was much more worthy of respect in the first place. There's no way I could respect this movie.
Still, if a movie like "Van Helsing" fails to entertain you then there's not much point to it. I respect your opinion on this type of movie, but I've read enough positive responses to the movie from people whose opinions I also respect that I'll seek it out rather than avoid it. Hopefully I'll like it more than you did :)
no subject
Date: 2004-05-18 07:56 pm (UTC)Probably better if you don't re-read the books before watching, because it takes considerable liberties with Homer's story (credits describe it as 'inspired by' Homer, never a good sign). Paris lives, Helen escapes, Ajax dies much too early and in wrong fashion, Cassandra is nowhere to be seen, both Menelaus and Agamemnon get killed off before the fall of Troy, etc etc...
That was certainly an important issue, particularly for lovers of the original, but I felt I'd made that point and wanted to move on. What I said afterwards was that taken on its own merits - i.e. if you judge it as a free-standing story, instead of how well it mirrors the source material - it was 'quite good'.
Compare to Das Boot, which was also based on a fictionalised account of true events. IIRC, Petersen made some changes to the book, and the book itself made some changes to what actually happened. (Mostly, IIRC, to tighten the story by bringing events that happened on multiple voyages into a single voyage.)
But we don't need to have read the book, or know what really happened, to say that Das Boot is a good movie. Regardless of how much of the credit for that is due to Petersen, how much to Lothar Buchheim, and how much to the fates that drove the events on which Buchheim's book was based.
That was the judgement I was making on Troy: its treatment of the source material is indeed rather drastic, but on its own it's quite a good film. (And I realise that for a lot of people, it's very difficult to judge it away from its source material, because Homer casts a long shadow.)
Compared to something like Gladiator, I thought Troy had a lot more depth. Most war movies end up carrying a moral of dulce et decorum est pro patria mori; while Troy does celebrate the heroism of people like Hector, it also reminds us that there's something to be said for pro familia vivendi. (If I have my Latin right there.)
With Van Helsing... it rode roughshod over its sources, certainly, and that irritated me. I probably had a harder time overlooking that than I did with Troy, because I'm more attached to VH's source material.
But really, that was the least of my objections. Even if Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Wolfman had all been invented by Sommers for this movie, it would still have been awful. There was so much of it that simply made no sense - see catalogue of stupidities above, for starters.
And while I'm not going to demand that a movie like this obeys RL physics, it does grate when they make no effort whatsoever to be even self-consistent. (More detail on that when you've seen it, perhaps? Some of what I'd say here involves major spoilers.)
FWIW, I quite enjoyed The Mummy; it wasn't exactly thought-provoking, but it was quite fun. Van Helsing didn't work anywhere near as well, IMHO.
no subject
Date: 2004-05-18 10:54 pm (UTC)I was perhaps a bit touchy about "Van Helsing" because I want to like it, and I realised as I was posting my comment that reading it in the context of your "Troy" review, and other people's positive "Van Helsing" reviews, wasn't really fair. I'll have to come back to this after I've seen it.
no subject
Date: 2004-05-19 01:34 am (UTC)Although if I could change just one thing about it I'd get rid of the ewoks in gas masks. What the hell was that all about?
Oh, and you might enjoy this. "Hurry! We're behind on our rope-swinging quota!"