I liked it more than I thought I would, until the last 15 minutes. I can’t remember exactly what happened at that point, but I remember thinking, “Crap, maybe it is a bad show.” I’ll watch the second episode, though, and give it another shot.
I didn’t find the American accent so distracting as him switching back and forth between British/American. I got why, and had no trouble understanding him, but for some reason it was annoying.
And, sadly, I do not find Jonathan Rhys Meyers to be all that attractive. I wouldn’t call him unattractive, but he’s certainly not as studly as the opera scene would have us believe him to be.
More tits? That one blonde was practically offering hers up on a shelf.
I’ll take the blonde, actually. Checked IMDb, and the actress (Victoria Smurfit) is nearly 40. I give the producers credit for not casting the latest 20-something eye candy as London power brokers.
It was OK, especially considering this was network TV. But I don’t get this Order of the Dragon thing. Are they immortals… other vampires… what? Are the guys there today the same guys who went after him back in the day? Or are they just the latest regular folk carrying on the evil tradition.
Eh.
It was interesting to watch for the “what did they do with THIS element” factor. I just watched every movie adaptation of the original story a couple of months ago. It’s kinda fun to see a Renfield who’s not flyshit crazy, and a matter-of-fact Van Helsing (Kretschmer seems to be the current go-to guy for Strong Male Character with an Accent, and one who’s working his way through the horror genre – he’s been Dracula himself, Dr. Frankenstein, and Captain Englehorn from King Kong)
Dracula’s invitation to everyone as he enters is straight from Bram Stoker’s Book. As far as I can recall, nobody’s actually quoted it in full before. Nice touch.
Harker as a newspaper reporter? Stolen from the stag play Passion of Dracula that ran about the same time Frank Langella brought the Count back to Broadway.
Dracula falls for Mina as the Reincarnation of his Lost Love? Straight outta the 1992 Francis Ford Coppola film. Richard Matheson had suggested something like it in his script for the 1973 TV Dan Curtis/Jack Palance Dracula, only it was Lucy in that one who was the image of the Count’s wife. Matheson, in turn, seems to have lifted the idea from the John Balderston script for the 1932 version of The Mummy. It ain’t in Stoker’s book. Of course, Balderston is the one who massaged Hamilton Deane’s stage play Dracula into the hit version, so there’s at least a hint of justification there.
Lucy’s a cute bitch, as in several versions. Can’t complain on that score.
Making Dracula a hero? There are a few works with that. Puitting him against a SPECTRE-liike organization? I can live without it. I foresee this drifting far from its roots, and my losing interest.
I think my wife summed it up well. “They put a lot of the Dracula mythos ideas into a hat, along with some other ideas, pulled out Dracula, Order of the Dragon, Victorian, Steampunk and went with it.”
After some of the really good pilots over the years, this one reminded me of ones from the 80s where its all forced because they have to work in certain things. So when Dracula was explaining his plan, to someone who knew, it didn’t work for me. The “science” behind the light bulbs also felt too forced to me.
I won’t say it worked for me overall but I’m curious enough to watch the next one. The only thing I didn’t like was the sunlight burning him. I was hoping we could move back to a more “creature of the night” idea and he’s not as powerful in the day but I guess not.
It does look like they’re going with tradition in terms of, the metaphysics of vampirism I guess you’d say. Personally I respect that and I think they were really duty bound to do so. This isn’t some sparkly vampire knock-off movie but the original. I like that they’re giving it some respect at least from this point of view.
I really wanted to like this, but it seemed to hit a sort of unsweet spot of being both too silly and not silly enough to work. Had they had the courage to go completely over the top with this, I’d have enjoyed it more. I also think it would have been better if they hadn’t tried to “reimagine” so many of the characters from the novel. The new Renfield and Van Helsing were interesting, but I felt like the others should have just been original characters without the same names as characters in the novel.
What I think would have been a bit more clever would be if the backstory of this series was that the major events of the novel Dracula had already taken place a few years previously…only Dracula wasn’t really defeated. Maybe Van Helsing gave Harker et al false information so they thought they’d defeated Dracula but really he was able to recover. A couple of years later he returns to London with his new Bruce Wayne persona to continue what turns out to have been his original plan of defeating the Order of the Dragon.
Yeah, this series seems to hoping to capitalize on Jonathan Rhys Meyers’s sex appeal, but shot itself in the foot by having a plot that requires him to do half of his scenes with a completely unattractive voice. That the accent is a little off isn’t IMHO in and of itself a big problem, as it’s supposed to be a phony accent for his character. The problem is that the voice of Dracula’s American persona is irritating. I kept thinking he sounded like someone impersonating Bill Clinton. It seems like there are a lot of ways they could have worked around this even without recasting the role, but in the pilot at least they didn’t seem to be trying.
But . . . but . . . but in the original, he could go out in the day. Well, in Stoker, anyway. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t like the sparkles. I want a monster. But I want an interesting monster.
These are both great ideas that would have worked better. Again, when he laid out his plans, it felt off for him to be monologuing. As if he was trying to convince Reinfeld when he should just be talking about how they will pay.
I also love the idea of the Count of Monte Cristo idea of him being back later.
I wanted it set in modern times, personally. Or no earlier than the “goth movement” of the 80s? Still have the other plans but modern for some reason. I was hoping they would do something cool with that.
Okay but the casting was the least of my issues with it. Good thoughts, though!
Actually, if you want an interesting new “take” on Dracula that doesn’t stray exceptionally far from Stoker’s book, but that re-interprets the events of the book in a new way, let me recommend the 2006 Dracula, made by Granada/WGBH (the same channels who did the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes) and broadcast on PBS in the US. It has David Suchet (Hercule Poirot!) as Van Helsing, and no Victorian steampunk evil conglomerate criminal enteprises
I was thinking it would have been kind of fun to have this set in the 1920s, although I guess we already have Downton Abbey for that.
I actually think Jonathan Rhys Meyers as Dracula is a rather inspired bit of casting. I don’t know if this is because of the kinds of roles he’s played in the past or if this is why he’s had the kinds of roles he’s had in the past, but he tends to come across as a bit creepy/sleazy/cold-blooded, like he knows he’s good looking enough to get away with his sinister schemes. So that’s the perfect vibe for this show’s take on Dracula. He also has a fair amount of experience in period pieces (often in “sexy bad guy” type roles), including The Tudors and a few movies set in the 19th century, so there’s a kind of logic to having him play a character who’s “lived” from the 1400s into the 1800s. But every time he spoke in his “American” voice it totally undermined whatever sex appeal or menace this character has.
Rhys Meyers is Irish (as was Bram Stoker, come to think of it) and it might have been better to just have Dracula’s alter ego be an Irishman who’d emigrated to the US and managed to make it big.
OMG the fangs! Sadly this is on NBC and not Showtime so we won’t see much skin or Dracula occasionally hooking up with a guy.
Which is fridge brilliance since Dracula wouldn’t have a perfect accent. Even with 15 yrs to acclimate to the modern world there’s probably a lot of things he’ll get slightly off.
Yeah, that bugged me too. It certainly makes the Masquerade is a lot more plausible he can walk around in daylight, among other possibilities. I wonder how he’s going to go to those board meetings.
Or be the grandson of Irish immigrants. That’s really rile those snooty English feathers. Anybody know if this is a limited series, or if it’s intended to be a standard opened ended one?
I was pleasantly surprised by that one, especially the hint of Dracula as WannaBe AntiChrist. Not thrilled by the lack of Renfield. The Arthur Holmwood revision at first irritated me, but finally won me over.
I’ll check out the NBC version but dammit, Dracula is a villian, Van Helsing is his nemesis, & Renfield is a comic/tragic lunatic. Don’t mess with that!
Well, unless you’re Fred Saberhagen & can pull off Dracula giving HIS side of the story! (“It was all a misunderstanding. Harker contracted brain fever & imagined a lot~ I gave my girls a piglet, not a baby! I had to vamp Lucy to save her from the lethal blood transfusions. I killed Renfield when he threatened to rape Mina. Btw, Mina loved me & we hooked up again when Harker died.”)
I just rewatched this the other day.
How is it Dracula is instantly rich and has a big giant palace if he’s been asleep for the past hundred years or so?
I knew it. Mina is Ilona, at least according to the vampire he sacrificed this week. But then in the previews they say something about the spell being broken. I’m still betting on a mystical or supernatural connection here.It was nice to see Vlad ahead of the curve in this episode. You started to get the feeling that he hadn’t really mastered his emotions and that the new/old vampire would be a problem, but as soon as he told him to ‘make her scream’ you could see how much he’s willing to sacrifice. I hate it when you have villains, even anti-hero types that don’t act in character. Here you have an ancient creature who should be 3 moves ahead playing as if he actually is one or two ahead rather than like some adolescent that has no self control.
It also looks like we’ll see Vlad as a daywalker soon. So while the previews seems to throw a few monkey wrenches into his plans, it looks like he also gets a few free lives as well.
Sadly this is on NBC and not Showtime so we won’t see much skin or Dracula occasionally hooking up with a guy.