Dracula (2007)

A brilliant film that helped define a genre

I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

In 1992, Francis Ford Coppola made the definitive version of Bram Stoker's novel "Dracula", with his stylish "Bram Stoker Dracula". Coppola's work and F.W. Murnau's masterpiece "Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens" are the best adaptation of the foregoing novel. I am a fan of vampire movies and the Hammer productions with the character Dracula performed by Christopher Lee are part of my youth."Dracula" (2006) is a stylish version made for television, with a great cast and magnificent cinematography that are wasted in a poorly written screenplay that introduces awful modifications to the original romance. This version is decent but absolutely unnecessary; entertains, but also disappoints the fans of the romance. My vote is five.Title (Brazil): "Dracula"

All the action was packed into the last couple of minutes. I was really excited about this when they showed you the trailers on television but was highly disappointed by it. I had never read Dracula before and didn't really understand it, luckily i read the book after. However there were a few good points in the film, for example when Johnathan goes to the castle the count is as i would imagine him in the book. However it leads up to a very disappointing end and doesn't explain why the count is the way his is, the history behind him which is mentioned in the book is missed out. A pretty poor BBC adaption of a well loved and known story

The problem with making a film out of "Dracula" is that the book was pretty good to start with. Cinematically written, with well-measured pace changes, atmospheric description, three-dimensional characters and grand settings and vistas, it should transcribe perfectly to the screen. And, given the BBC's skill with period pieces and adaptations of classics (I mean, look at Pride and Prejudice), it should have transcribed perfectly. As far as I can see, the best explanation for its failure is that the creators didn't actually bother to read the book.Written in large letters on the BBC's "Dracula" website are the words "Returning to the original novel for his inspiration, Stewart Harcourt's script draws both on elements of Bram Stoker's own life and Victorian society to give this version of the vampire classic a new, modern sensibility." Nice sentiment, but complete drivel. Harcourt seems instead to believe that throwing in trivial details from the original text (Dracula's "youthening", the Count's ability to walk in sunlight) grants him licence to ignore the original plot. It doesn't. The film begins decently enough (the first of the many syphilis references notwithstanding - I'll get to those later), but Jonathan Harker's death early on is more than enough to give the lie to the BBC's grand statement on its website.And the syphilis. It seems to be the bounden duty of every pseudo-intellectual Dracula reader to insist that Bram Stoker was himself suffering from the disease when he wrote the book. In this adaptation that little shred of a hypothesis is blown up to cosmic proportions, and, while it's a nice way of saying "look at how educated we are", it doesn't stand up to the inflation, and it just doesn't work to hang an entire plot on it. Besides that, the simple fact of the matter is that Bram Stoker never did contract syphilis*, so the attempt at intellectualism is wasted.It's okay to change plots if you have to. Disney does it to make classic stories more child- friendly. The National Theatre did it to make Northern Lights more adaptable to the stage. But to rip a classic and originally compelling story to shreds, piece it back together in the wrong order like some gross literary Frankenstein's monster, and then claim that the adaptation returns to the material of the original book...well, frankly that's just false advertising.*The claim that Bram Stoker suffered from syphilis is based on the assertion of a single biographer that he died of "locomotor ataxy", a disease which, while occasionally associated with syphilis, has never been conclusively shown to be the same thing. Locomotor ataxy was certainly not recognised as an STD, which renders conclusively useless any theories that Stoker wrote Dracula as a commentary on syphilis and its associations with promiscuity or sexual deviance.

There are countless TV and movie adaptations of "Dracula." No single adaptation is perfect, but some of them are quite good. Unfortunately, this one falls under the disappointing category.The storyline deviates a lot from Bram Stoker's book. I guess the changes wouldn't bother me if I thought the "substitute" plot was any good - but it's not. This version of the story focuses on Lord Holmwood's battle with syphilis; in a weird twist, he actually brings Dracula to England in the hopes that the vampire can cure him. Holmwood also deceives Lucy at great length, concealing his condition from her even though they're married (this doesn't make any sense to me, actually; surely he would move heaven and earth to delay the wedding until AFTER Dracula cures him?) As a result of this plot tinkering, the subtexts of Stoker's novel are dragged out into the light in a somewhat tedious fashion; this is no longer a fantasy story, or a commentary on social diseases, it's ABOUT social diseases. Hmm - I don't think I like that. It's too unsubtle for me.I also don't really like this version's intense focus on the Seward / Holmwood / Lucy love triangle. It boils the whole story down to teenage love shenanigans. In fact, the entire production feels so juvenile that the arrival of Van Helsing, an actual adult (played by David Suchet, who can actually act!) comes like a breath of summer wind, or some-such pleasant thing.This version also tries too hard to look "right." Dracula's castle is shot in weird green-o-vision, and the cutting is so fast you'll think the thing has been edited together by monkeys.On the positive side, I enjoy Suchet's performance, and the production values are pretty good overall, my gripes notwithstanding. Marc Warren might have been a decent Dracula, though he doesn't have enough screen time to make an impression. And hey, Sophia Myles looks oh-so-good in those period dresses; her appearance boosted my rating up a star or two.As a whole, though, this is weak stuff. I used to rely on the BBC to produce quality, intelligent TV for a sophisticated audience, but for the past few years it seems to me that they've been pitching low, so to speak. Shame, that.