An Honest Review

Rating: 9/10 (4 December 2016)

I like to read through everyone's reviews before I actually write my own. Get a feel for what they liked and didn't. Especially what they didn't like. It tells you a lot about the world.
With new movies, if a certain age group hates on how boring it is, that means there is an abundance of story and characterization. It usually means that it is a pretty good flick.
Dracula isn't one of those movies, the haters are coming from a totally opposite direction.
This is one of those movies that the people hate because it wasn't exactly 100% like the books. To me that's boasting, it's saying "Look I'm literate!" It's a movie. It's the reason "Catch-22" fails when you turn it into a play, the formatting is too different, the time constraints too much and what works in books doesn't work in film.
I used to work in history and the same thing goes there, in fact a lot more in history. I don't understand those arguments at all.
Like the people that think they are being hip when they attack high school teachers for not teaching the REAL history. Teachers have 45 minutes a day for a few months to fit in 400 years in the US and 5,000 in world history.
It's not propaganda, it's not lies, it's abridgement based on time and format.
Who cares if it doesn't completely follow the book? You want the book, read the book.
Dracula was great.
For starters the soundtrack was moving. It was beautiful. It was sublime. It was brilliant. It was all the words for genius you can think of.
And for those of you that like special effects, Dracula was surreal and not CGI. I've always thought that movies that did as much as possible in camera looked better, more real and Dracula, well, it doesn't look necessarily more relativistic but more like nightmare dream. Again, beautiful.
And the cast. Legend has it that it was Ryder's dream cast. Gary Oldman, Anthony Hopkins, Richard E. Grant, Cary Elwes, Billy Campbell and Keanu Reeves is the only weak link in that chain...but that isn't really Keanu's fault.
The fact is Mr. Reeves was just too Gen-X to be in a period film. The man looks, talks, and acts like he's from my Generation and they through him in Victorian England? Really? It's not that he did a bad job, it's just that he looked out of place the entire time. Ryder is Gen-X too, but she has a look that can transcend that.
If they updated the film, made it in the 90s, and threw Harker in a flannel, some torn jeans and a pair of Doc Martins then people would be raving about how great of a job he did. How much he looked the part.
As it stands he was distracting. Not because he didn't do a good job but because it's just impossible for him to look Victorian and really pull it off.
And then back to the haters. "Dracula" was written in an epistolary format, can someone explain to me how a script is going to stay true to that? Yes, let's narrate ALL of the film? Let's sit people down in front of a camera and let them read news clippings and journals to the audience? Yeah, there is going to be some heave abridgement there. The script did a great job of making the story interesting for the silver screen.
Hollywood is way out over there and real life and source material are right here. If the two merge too much than Hollywood would cease to be entertaining.