Vampire Academy
should have been a great film. It’s based on an addictively wonderful book by
Richelle Mead. It was written and directed by the Waters brothers, who
separately directed Mean Girls and
wrote Heathers. So why is it such a terrible,
inept piece of film-making? And what can we learn from it?
Spoilers ahead…
The Vampire Thing.
So probably the first thing that went wrong with Vampire Academy
is the “vampire” thing. People, at this point, are pretty sick of
vampires, after years of Twilight and
True Blood and Vampire Diaries. Vampires aren’t just overexposed — zombies are
overexposed too, but they keep coming — they’re associated with a certain
brand of soapy gothic melodrama and a fanbase that’s obsessive and (horrors!)
mostly female.
So in fact, the Vampire Academy
movie compulsively tries to distance itself from the genre it belongs to,
throwing in some feeble Twilight
jokes and pretending that the “V-word” is some kind of tawdry
mislabeling of its noble blood-drinkers.
In fact, Mead’s Vampire Academy
books are like nothing else out there, despite having the requisite love
triangles, angst and misunderstood heroines. For one thing, the core of the
first book is a beautiful story about a friendship between two girls, the
Princess Vasilisa Dragomir (aka Lissa) and her protector, Rose Hathaway.
They’re so close that Rose can actually see through Lissa’s eyes, and Rose is
an angry brawler in Lissa’s defense. Lissa is a Moroi, part of the bloodsucking
royalty, whereas Rose is a half-human Dhampir. They’re threatened by the
Strigoi, who are basically Moroi gone bad.
The other core of the first Vampire Academy book is a story about slut-shaming, as everybody
suspects (rightly) that Rose let Lissa drink her blood when they were on the
run from the Academy for a year. This is the biggest taboo in their society,
and Dhampirs who let Moroi drink their blood are consigned to brothels, to
become “blood whores,” useless for anything but sex and
blood-drinking. Soon some boys are claiming that Rose let them drink her blood,
too, and she’s falsely accused of being the school blood slut.
It’s actually pretty intense and weird — and a
representation of adolescence that the ever-more-prolific young-adult fiction
genre has seldom represented.
Making it a comedy
So the second mistake was probably trying to turn this super-emotional,
heartfelt story into a straight-up comedy, and hiring the guys behind Mean Girls and Heathers to make it happen. You can see the logic of doing this:
It’s a story about girls and bullying, and the Waters brothers are responsible
for two of the most famous films in that niche.
The problem is, so much of what’s going on in Vampire Academy is really internal, and
we really need to be able to feel the inner lives of these characters —
especially Rose, who has to struggle with fearing that she really is the person
they all think she is. And nothing in the book is simple, as Rose loathes the
Moroi snobs but also wants Lissa to take her rightful place among them. If you
don’t feel Rose’s rage, passion and internalized self-loathing, then this story
simply falls apart.
In fact, that’s what happens — everything in the movie is
played for a joke, and instead of having intense emotions that she barely knows
what to do with, Rose is played as sort of a young Tina Fey. (With maybe a hint
of Ellen Page?) She’s constantly cracking wise, and seems kind of detached from
all the action around her. Her tragic crush on her hot Dhampir instructor
Dimitri, her confusing feelings about her best friend, her social awkwardness
— it’s all sort of treated as a slightly depressing joke, rather than
something keenly felt.
You could imagine the Waters brothers making a brand new vampire
comedy from scratch, about vampire mean girls and their pranks that
progressively get more deadly — and maybe it would be watchable. But unfortunately,
they’re stuck with the ill-fitting Vampire
Academy, in which the “mean girls” are just part of a larger and
more intricate storyline.
It’s kind of surreal, if you’ve read the Vampire Academy
book, to watch the movie and see it cycle through pretty much exactly the same
plot points — except that they all fall flat because they’re played for laughs
in a weak fashion.
And that’s the thing: The Waters Brothers might have seemed
like a good fit for this property at a glance, because “teen girls”
and “bullying,” but once you glance a tiny bit closer, they start to
look like the worst possible fit. Because the brothers’ strong suit, their zany
irony, only distances you from the heart of the material, the emotional story
— and without that heart, the thing is dead on arrival.
Forgetting to make it
funny
But even that doesn’t really get to the heart of what’s
wrong here. Because the Vampire Academy
isn’t funny, at all — not even as a “so
bad it’s good” film. There are maybe one or two quotable lines of
dialogue in the entire thing. The humor feels mostly forced — and worse, as
though the characters are as bored with all this as we are.
Here’s a sample line of dialogue from the film: “You
Dragomirs are all such drags.”
And also, the humor is pressed into service to deliver the
exposition that the movie is too blasé to deliver in an effective manner. The
first ten minutes of the film consist entirely of characters having “As you know, Bob”
conversations with each other, interspersed with a painfully bludgeony
voiceover from Rose, in which she fills in the gaps. And it never stops — the
whole movie is full of bland exposition, gussied up with a layer of snark
that’s supposed to make it funny.
It’s not just that the Waters brothers are unable to convey
the complexity of this world without spoonfeeding the viewers information —
fair enough, there’s a lot going on here. It’s also that they don’t have any
interest in conveying anything throughany other means.
Halfway through the movie, Lissa turns to Rose and says,
“You’re the impulsive one and I’m the cautious one.” As if the movie
just realized that these crucial character traits probably hadn’t come across
at all up to this point. (And they hadn’t, sadly.) So the movie needs to explain the characters to us in shorthand.
The clunky humor and weak exposition are actually just
symptoms of a bigger problem: the “cliff’s notes” scene-setting.
Every single scene in this movie feels like the cliff’s notes of a proper
scene, which might not even be longer but might feature people actually
interacting and talking like real people. Every scene consists of the
characters narrating the outlines of the scene, rather than actually
experiencing the scene. I’ve seen this in a lot of other bad movies, lately,
and it seems to be a symptom of film-makers feeling alienated from their
material.
The ineptness doesn’t stop there, either — the main actors
in the film all seem painfully miscast. I’m sure they’re all great actors, but
pretty much none of them seems to be able to work with their characters as
written. As mentioned, Zoey Deutch seems weirdly detached as Rose, Lucy Fry is
sort of anemic as Lissa, and Olga Kurylenko seems unsure whether the
headmistress is supposed to be drunk all the time.
Every action scene in the movie is shot in a weird parody of
the “shaky cam” style so that you have a vague impression of motion
at the edge of the frame. The CG creatures that show up at the end of the movie
seem honestly apologetic for their “Lawnmower
Man on crack” badness. The whole thing is incredibly choppy, and if
any suspense or drama managed to seep in somehow, it would leak out through the
massive holes in the scene-setting.
Not respecting the
material or the audience
But honestly, none of that stuff is the root of the problem.
The root of the problem appears to be a lack of respect for the books, and for
the people who love them. At least, that’s the message I get from the actual
film, which seems to roll its eyes at the whole notion of a fancy boarding
school for vampires, or vampire aristocracy, or a secret war against evil
super-vampires.
There are two ways of turning this material into a comedy:
one is to invest fully in the reality of what’s going on, and find a way to
laugh in the midst of the pain. (To do Vampire
Diaries, basically.) And the other is to treat the whole thing as a flimsy
charade, in which no sensible person could possibly care about any of this, and
why bother even trying to make sense of it? The latter approach smacks of
disdain for the actually-quite-good books, but it’s also a surefire way to make
a film that doesn’t work as a comedy or as a vampire saga.
And that’s really the crux of the problem: whether it’s the
Waters’ fault or someone else’s, Vampire Academy
shows that if you don’t respect the story you’ve set out to tell, then you’re
not going to succeed in rising above it. You’re not going to create some
triumphant spoof that transcends the tawdriness of your source. Instead, you’ll
end up making something infinitely worse, that not only lets down everyone who
loved the thing you’re mocking, but also fails on its own terms.
