Guest wrote: ↑Wed Jun 09, 2021 7:47 am
Guest wrote: ↑Wed Jun 09, 2021 7:44 am
Coppola's Dracula is a perfectly good adaptation of the novel ruined by retarded DraculaXMina fanfic.
And feminism
I guess? The whole point of making Dracula a romantic hero is to make him a symbol of sexual liberation and subversive anti-Christian values. It was a push by drug addicted commie lit scholars who came into their own as hippies on college campuses to make raping Christian women until they turn into child molesting devil worshippers cool and hip. Feminism is related to that line of thinking but mostly incidental.
A big problem with FFC's Drac is that it tries to make Dracula a misunderstood romantic hero, but other than a few scenes portraying Van Helsing as a dick fails to properly demonize the actual heroes of the story so Harker and the three suitors are just kind of left adrift in the plot of the film. Van Helsing is either a insane bigot unfairly persecuting the vampires or an unpleasant but still heroic figure or...both? Reeves was never going to be a ideal Harker but he might have had more to work with if he had someone, anyone, to give his character some kind of direction other than "be a whiny Brit loser who's only purpose in this story is to get cucked by an evil corpse." Similarly Lucy is both a willing supplicant of Dracula (as in the hippie boomer revisionist version of the story) and a innocent victim of his depredations, destroyed and ultimately twisted into a vile shadow of him that preys on children (what Stoker wrote).
So, it's a narrative mess. The only characters who really matter are Dracula and Mina, the lovestruck ancient vampire who just needs to be shown tender love and care to mend his broken heart and his drippy human girlfriend who's not like other girls you see. She's special. If you're thinking "that's Twilight" you're wrong, because that's every vampire romance written since 1970 whatever. It's pablum for teenage girls and bores middle aged housewives, except then Francis also includes in his story literal geysers of blood and Dracula shapeshifting. Notice how vampires don't turn into bats anymore and in fact in every piece of vampire fiction to come out since the turn of the millennium has mocked the very notion of vampires turning into bats? It's because bats are icky gross flying rats and that's not sexy and horny femcels are controlling the zeitgeist.
Coppola has Dracula being a misunderstood rich immortal warlord (hawt) with a broken heart and temper issues (hawt) but then he portrays him as taking the shape of an old man (ew) a bat monster (ick) a werewolf (as if!) and a literal swarm of rats (GROSS) so Coppola's Dracula becomes nobody's Dracula. To gorey and gross for the Twilight set, to sappy and soapy for horror fans.