British TV producers Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss gave the world a revamped Doctor Who and the modern version of Sherlock. Given their pedigree, what could they take on next?
How about Bram Stoker’s Transylvanian count? Well, that’s what we got with a modernized mini-series Dracula, now available on Netflix in its entirety.
Spread out over three 90 minute episodes, this new Dracula seems to want to stick to the spirit of Stoker’s novel while maybe not sticking strictly to the plot. In the late 19th century, lawyer Jonathan Harker (John Heffernan), travels to Transylvania to do business for the reclusive Count Dracula (Danish actor Claes Bang). Dracula is a decrepit old man who can barely speak English, and always with a thick Eastern European accent. He insists Harker stay and teach him English, and Harker reluctantly agrees, but he’s telling this story to a nun in a convent, one Sister Agatha Van Helsing (Dolly Wells).
Yes, Van Helsing is a woman this time.
But as Harker stays in the castle, his health deteriorating, the Count gets younger and his English gets better, developing what sounds like a working class English accent. This Dracula, you see, can learn through drinking blood. By drinking Harker’s blood, he comes to understand everything Harker knows, including the English language. Now he wants to go to England and do what he’s been doing for centuries in Transylvania. Yes, he seems to have some weaknesses like sunlight and the cross, though oddly enough other vampires don’t seem to have those drawbacks.
So, the three episodes each cover part of Stoker’s novel. The first episode, “The Rules of the Beast,” is set in Dracula’s castle and his first encounter with Van Helsing. The second, “Blood Vessel,” covers his fateful ocean voyage, a scene often cut somewhat short in most other versions. The final one, “The Dark Compass,” is another story, as it covers the end of Stoker’s book but is set in modern day London, with Wells now playing the original Van Helsing’s great-grandniece. This last one is where the series somewhat loses itself.
The first episode is actually well-crafted and shows just how evil Dracula is. He doesn’t mind making more of his kind (he calls any vampire he makes, regardless of gender, his “bride”), and the things he does don’t make him out to be tragically romantic like other incarnations. He’s an evil creature, and there’s no two ways about it. The second episode continues this trend, having him picking off the crew and passengers of a relatively small sailing ship one by one. There’s some clever script work at play, and I liked what I saw. Maybe 90 minutes is a bit too long per episode, but so far, so good.
But putting this Dracula into the modern age seems to be too clever by half. Despite a strong start, the series ends with 90 minutes of the second Van Helsing trying to figure out Dracula’s psychology and the implications of what kind of man he is or isn’t. The evil that defined Dracula seems to have faded away to a more benign being doing…something. He wasn’t good, but the horror was gone as he did his thing with Lucy Westenra (Lydia West). Whatever threat Dracula posed for the first two episodes just wasn’t there anymore.
Now, the third episode does wrap the story up in what could be a finite way, but each episode was a little weaker than the one before it. I did like most of what I saw with the first two, but the last one just killed whatever momentum the series had from there.
Grade: C+
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