Post by jdv on Aug 15, 2023 14:30:48 GMT -5
Universal's put out two Dracula-themed movies this year, RENFIELD a comedy with Nic Cage as Dracula, and now THE LAST VOYAGE OF THE DEMETER, a serious take on Dracula's transport to England from Transylvania. The original concept was essentially like that in ALIEN - a doomed ship with a unkillable monster. DEMETER is, sadly, nothing close to the movie which inspired it.
While the production has everything you'd expect in a big budget studio movie - big sets, good costumes, a score by Bear McCreary, lots of SFX - on the whole the movie is disappointing. There are a multitude of problems with this flick, almost all of which could have been avoided with a serious re-write of the script which at nearly every turn makes the wrong decision, including the main plot, the journey to England.
Because there's not much description from Bram Stoker on exactly what happens on the boat, or who crews it, film makers are a bit freer to make it up. What the movie chooses to fill in the gaps isn't very compelling - none of the characters seem terribly realistic (none are Eastern European), the actors aren't terribly charismatic, don't have much chemistry between each other, and of course we know how the story is going to end (assuming you know anything about the original book/movie).
Which perhaps isn't unexpected as the movie originally cast Noomi Rapace, Jude Law, and Ben Kingsley in the lead roles... way back in 2010. None of them are actually in the finished film. Let's just say that their replacements in 2022 aren't the same caliber. The fact that this film began life way back in 2003 is a fairly big clue as to why it felt so uneven.
The choices finally settled on are pretty much all bad ones - Dracula shown more as a clothes-less Nosferatu monster rather than the slick aristocrat pictured in the novel. The main human character, the ship's doctor, is seeking the meaning of life (or some such), yet even when confronted by something clearly super natural it doesn't seem to move the needle much for him. Not helping much is an obviously shoe-horned into the script late in the process plot line making him black, English, and oppressed b/c of those facts. None of that even remotely hinted at in the book (indeed, in the book Jonathan Harker seems to be the only Englishman in the entire region), so having a character be bitter because Transylvanians are racist (and the English too) made zero sense, both in a historic context and in the narrative.
The goofiness doesn't stop there - when stabbed with a stake, vampires explode into flame and cinder ala BLADE - a completely out of place effect for this particular story. A woman victim is saved from sure death via a blood transfusion, but doing the same for a child has no effect (in other words, the movie doesn't follow its own rules). The music is professional and well recorded, but not a single theme to be found - the music essentially acts merely as emotional guideposts and/or musical stabs for jump scares. McCreary - who did wonderful a wonderful score for the BATTLESTAR GALACTICA series reboot is capable of much more. In other words, you won't be humming the theme from this movie at Halloween.
DEMETER tries to set up an unlikely sequel in the last scene of the movie, which only served to make you you wonder why the producers chose to spend to much time on the boat journey when they obviously were more interested in dealing w/ Dracula in London. This another bad outcome of a movie in production so long that none of the original people were involved when it finally got shot.
Worst of all, like virtually all modern movies, DEMETER is waaaay too long. At 2 hours, it's minimally 30 minutes longer than it needed to be and arguably an hour too long. Of all the avoidable movie sins, this is most egregious as it's an indication that it's too in love with itself.
It's not horrible, but is less than the sum of its parts. For a vastly better version of the same tale check out Netflix/BBC DRACULA mini-series which came out in 2020 (specifically episode 2), a show which makes far better decisions with far better cast actors.
BOTTOM LINE: 2.5 "Where are his clothes?" out of 5 stars
