Peace lies in the crossing of two bloodlines

Rating: 9/10 (6 June 2007)

Apart from the comic trip look and feel of this film, apart from the special effects both on the side of the vampires and on the side of the werewolves, apart from the impossible love affair between a vampire girl and a werewolf boy, at the beginning qt least, soon to become something else, this film is decadent in all possible ways and somewhere kind of paranoid. And yet there is something that floats over the whole thing, that survives the animal horror that animates these pictures and bleak places. Two species have been fighting for centuries and the salvation of both is in a new blood line that will cross the two different ones. Peace can only come from crossing the bloodlines of the two rivals, the two enemies, the two antagons. And that works, in the film of course, because in reality if it were that simple! It has been noticed that when a civil war starts we never know when it will stop. It took some thirty years for the latest episode of the Irish civil war to come to maybe an end and that was only the last episode of a war that was started by the invasion and conquest of Ireland by the English three or four centuries ago. And I will not speak of the Bosnian or Kosovar conflicts, nor of the opposition between Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq and in the world. But that's the optimistic final scene of a film that targets teenagers when war comes to an end because the two bloodlines have been mixed in the veins of a new leader. Yet I found the film a little bit long and repetitive as for the fighting scenes.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine & University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne