(Spoilers!) Not loving it anymore...

Rating: 5/10 (1 January 2005)

I saw this movie when it first hit the screen and it completely blew me away at the time. The drama, horror, soundtrack, dizzying sights, twists & turns. The opening score is among the most chilling and moving I have ever heard.
I hadn't read any of Anne Rice's books at the time, but very soon I had caught up with most of what she'd written up to 1994. At first I liked all that too, but after a couple of years something began to gnaw. Eventually most of my appreciation for her books and this movie vanished. Why? Simply because there isn't anything beneath it all. The faces may be pretty, the story lines gripping, the injustice of it all indeed crying to heaven, but none of it means *anything*! It's just pomp and flash, rapid twists and turns, "a lot of sound and fury, in the end signifying nothing!" Really not all that different from the "videoclips with story lines" from the 1980's and 1990's.
But it's all very clever from a marketing point of view, of course. After all, there is so much pain and misery in the average person's life. And here's a movie with a main character (Louis de Pointe du Luc) who is forever lamenting the loss of his wife and child (or brother, for the book version) and Claudia, while (eventually) murdering blindly because all his grief means that no one else's suffering matters. And there's Lestat cheerfully advocating murder & mayhem. Or Armand and all the many stories he could tell, if only Louis helps him connect with the spirit of the time (whatever that means). And there are villains like Santiago and all the other decadent vampires. Oh, and there's the sensuality behind a vampire's killing by slowly drinking a person to death, of course. The viewer/reader can pick and mix as few or as many of these ingredients as they please. Wallow in self-pity and misery, even over your own choices (what, Louis had no idea what being a vampire might entail? Or that immortality would mean eternal melancholy for him?). Or dream of escaping all the pain and risk of life by becoming Lestat's type of vivacious immortal. Or simply chase after all the wild story lines that people the movie/book. Or enjoy the sensuality of this particular breed of vampires. Really, it's truly an Every(wo)man's story! Louis admits it at the end of course: you've been had, it doesn't mean anything. "Do with it what you will." Daniel's anger and disappointment are only natural, but he soon finds out that he is in no position to criticize Louis, getting forcefully pushed against the ceiling (movie) or almost drained to death (book). But even at the end there's no time to reflect for Daniel (or the viewer), because another rapid twist occurs: Lestat jumps the (inter)viewer and gives him "the choice that I never had"... And then it's roll credits to Lestat's laughter and Guns 'n Roses' cover of "Sympathy for the Devil".
No, 10 years later the kindest words I can say about this movie are that it's a very good approximation of the book. In spirit if not totally in plot. But a good conversion of something bad still isn't much to write home about. I can only give it a 5/10.