Blade (1998 film) Directed by Stephen Norrington

Blade (1998 film)

Directed by Stephen Norrington 

It's the late 90s and Marvel is struggling, having declared bankruptcy and having several of its initiatives to rekindle the business fail. On the movie front attempts at using characters to gather a wider audience have led to three legendary failures, the 1989 Punisher film (which was described as boring!), the 1990 Captain America movie (which we will never talk about), and the legendary failure of Howard the Duck. Marvel gathered itself together for one final toss of the dice; both in comics by launching the Marvel Knights line, and in movies by making a deal with New Line Cinema for a film starring a little-known character known as Blade the vampire hunter. Let me talk about the comic book Blade before we get into the movie. 

Blade was created in the 1970s as a supporting character for the horror comic Tomb of Dracula, which Marvel created when the ban on Horror comics in general and vampires in specific was relaxed (Comic self-censorship follows a similar path as movie censorship.). Marv Wolfman created him in 1973 and he appeared in the 10th issue. Blade at the time dressed in bright colors sported an afro and was known for leading an all-black squad of vampire hunters and wielding knives made of carved teakwood (Okay, that’s actually pretty boss.). Now the teak wood blades make sense because you need to use a wooden stake in the comics. The rest of the vampire hunters didn't last long, however, as Dracula did what he usually does to vampire hunters, drain them dry. Which only served to intensify the battles between him and Blade (You killed obvious cannon-fodder friend number 2!  Noooo! {All things considered buddy under the current rules of fiction, you’re the cannon-fodder friend, are you sure you wanna invoke that trope?}). 

Despite his solo comics never really lasting, Blade proved to be the longest-lasting contribution of Tomb of Dracula to the wider Marvel Universe, outlasting even Dracula himself. Despite Marv reigning in Blade appearances, he kinda overshadowed the main characters as a rival for Dracula. Interestingly enough he wasn't a Dhampir but a well-trained mortal man, having been trained from a young age by a number of mentors who drifted in and out of his life (Oh come on!  Why can’t these kids have stable home lives and mentors?  This is not healthy. {Healthy people don’t decide to hunt monsters as their life’s work}). Despite his lack of superpowers he would go on to serve on superhero teams, show up in the Spider-man cartoon and always, always be on the hunt for vampires. 

The film re-imagined Blade from the ground up, with a lot of the input coming from Wesley Snipes and David Goyer. Blade was given a more 90s aesthetic, wearing a black overcoat and ballistic armor, his origin was reworked to let him stand toe to toe with super-powered beasts of the night. This also let him tap into something else but we'll get there. Instead of leading a team of hunters, he worked alone, as long as we didn't count his aging mentor Whistler, who was created wholesale for the film (Who is totally awesome BTW, and finally someone stable in poor Blade’s life.). This re-imaging was so successful and popular that it led to Marvel overwriting the comic character in favor of the film character; even having Morbius, another vampiric character, bite Blade in the comics to turn him into a Daywalker and grant him the powers of the film version (Wait, how does that work? Is this a kind of half-transformation thing where he either has to kill someone giving into his blood-lust, have sex with a vampire post-bite or in lieu of it [hot], or drink the vampire’s blood to go fully vamp? {Keep in mind that Morbius is a vampire created through SCIENCE! And not traditional means so the rules are different for him}). 

 Deacon Frost also appears in the comics but as an old man who killed Blade's mother after he was born. In the comics, he's a scientist who turned himself into a vampire via experiments with vampire blood, which only reinforces the need for an ethics committee (Where the hell is the IRB in comic universities?!  WHERE IS IT!? {Eaten by vampire scientists clearly}). He would duel with Blade and appear to be killed several times only to return each time through the powers of dark science or magic. The film re-imagines him as a young and hungry vampire resentful of how the elder “purebloods” of vampiric society keep trying to lock him out of political and economic power (And before anyone says anything, this is new bourgeoise vs old bourgeoisie, they should all get the choppy choppy {Normally I would find this debatable but they are all literally bloodsucking monsters here}). His plan is simple: he's going to use the leaders of pureblood society to ascend to godhood and become a vampiric god on earth. Then he'll use his vampiric powers to turn the majority of the population into vampires, overtaking pureblood society through a combination of divine might and sheer numbers. The film also comes up with the idea that some people are born vampires, which raises the question of how come there aren't more Dhampirs running around if vampires can sire offspring? (My guess is that when vampires fuck, they create vampires.  When a vampire fucks a mortal, or maybe someone who isn’t turned yet, it will create Dhampirs. {Which means all a Vampire has to do to create a squad of superhuman soldiers is seduce a couple of women and raise the children. Am I supposed to believe that vampires and humans just never have sex together?  Because Blade is presented as a singular event!})

The film itself was Marvel's first box office success and made a profit, making 131 million against a budget of 45 million. I know that by today's numbers that doesn't sound like a lot, but keep in mind this was almost 30 years ago and the market was very different then. Blade proved that Marvel heroes could be successful on the big screen, which would be reinforced in 2002 by Sony's Spider-man. It also began to kindle ambitions in Hollywood and within the halls of Marvel comics but that's a story for another time. Now, this almost went the other way, there were executives in New Line who were convinced that a serious action horror film couldn't work and wanted to rework Blade as a parody. With one group of executives actually going so far as to ask why not make Blade white (Fucking. White. People.). However, Norrington, Goyer, and Snipes managed to convince everyone to hold the course and we're probably better off for it (If the alternative was white-washing, yes.  Yes we are. {Or a parody, which was not something we needed}). 

Because the film itself is, in a lot of ways, the grand evolution of the 1980s action movie Snipe's Blade is unrelentingly stoic, expressing himself mainly through one-liners and physical action. The action is brutal and gory with blood and dismemberment everywhere. Blade tears through humans and vampires alike with a grand disregard for anything but achieving damage to his targets. This is summed up very nicely in the opening where Blade basically conducts a mass shooting at a vampire rave (In fairness, they were dancing in blood that was raining down from the sprinkler system.  They needed that mass shooting. {See next sentence}). The movie literally opens up with our hero attacking an unarmed group of dancers at a rave but gets us to cheer for him by showing that all of these people are brutal predators who are literally dancing in the blood of innocent people when he shows up. Subtlety is not one of the virtues of this movie. 

What it is profoundly good at is combining dialogue and visuals to tell various stories. By using Dr. Karen Jenson, a hematologist who Blade rescues on a whim, as our viewpoint character, we can be drawn into Blade's world by degrees. Each new revelation showing that elements we thought were innocent in prior scenes were actually rather sinister. I encourage everyone to watch the movie carefully, twice and realize that familiars (human servants of vampires) and vampires are hidden in the background of several scenes. Which creates a sort of feeling of initiation into a secret world while increasing the tension in the film. We also get a sense of various supporting characters' stories and histories this way, which is a very streamlined and efficient way to tell a story. 

The biggest complaint I have with that approach is that it limits the amount of characterization we can effectively do, and leaves a lot of questions unanswered. There are several supporting characters who we're left asking “wait who was that person?” For instance, the teenage African American girl who appears in several scenes and then just disappears partway through the movie. We're left wondering if she had some relationship to Blade, just what her relationship with Frost was, and what is she even doing here? For that matter, much of the dynamics of Frost's minions are underdeveloped, like why does Quinn work for Frost? What's the relationship between Blade's mother and the blonde vampire heavily implied to be Frost's current lover? None of these are really important to the main story, so they're never gone into, left for the viewer to fill in the blanks with their own imagination (Which, for my money, is fine.  A movie is a kind of simulation of a real set of inter-relationships; and one that cannot always be fully explored in the run-time of the film.  It is after the movie is released that it can take on a life of its own in all of our heads and become more of a simulacra. {It would still be nice to know who the hell that girl was supposed to be!}). 

Everything that isn't about advancing the main plot is left pretty bare bone. The movie relies heavily on archetypes and brief interludes to provide characterization to the various relationships. For example, Whistler’s and Blade's relationship on the surface seems fairly 1980s macho; two badasses united only by a shared purpose, but is given more depth by scenes such as Whistler holding Blade's hand (Which is pretty much unheard-of intimacy for two unrelated men in the 1990s.) while he suffers through the application of the serum that keeps his bloodthirst at bay. Even the action tells the story of the plot, Blade can raid any part of the vampire world he likes and slay dozens of vampires with impunity but he can't clear or hold territory, always having to flee before the overwhelming numbers of vampiric servants mass in enough numbers to pull him down. While each vampire he kills likely saves hundreds if not more lives, the problem is there seem to be plenty more vampires to replace the fallen and Blade is locked into a war that has no end-state until the end of the film where the good doctor suggests that a cure is possible for turned vampires at least, which would allow a massive thinning of their numbers. 

Blade works on several levels that would later be tapped into by other heroes and that we see powering the ideas of various characters throughout vampire fiction. There is of course the standard wish-fulfillment element and power fantasy. There is also the idea of a monster that chooses to protect humanity instead of preying on it. The vampires of Blade continue the themes first set up in The Vampyre, Carmilla, and Dracula: being able to move through our society as privileged members of it (the 1% if you will) and use that very privilege as a camouflage for their predation. Wouldn't it be nice if some of them used that power for the good of society instead of stating their own selfish hunger? (Gee, it would be nice, but art imitates life, and it doesn’t happen.) I think that's what gives the Dhampir myth its legs and fuels a number of other heroic archetypes. 

Blade isn't a cinematic classic, but I do think it has an important place in history and occupies an interesting place in vampire mythology where, like Buffy, the hunter overshadows the monster and becomes the driving force of the story. If vampires tell us that we do not own the night and that there are dark forces both out in the night and within our own society that sees us as nothing more than cattle to be drained; Blade, Buffy, and other fiction in the same vein tell us there are those with strength and determination who can push back such forces and allow a better type of society to thrive. Which is a very modern way of looking at it perhaps. Since the film is an adaptation, it's gonna get two grades. First, as a stand-alone film, I'm giving it a B. The stark and bare-bones character work and world-building prevent it from reaching A status but the action, efficiency of the plot, and great pacing of the film propel it above average I think. Second as an adaptation... I'm actually going to give it a B-. While it did reimagine its main character from the ground up, it did so in a way that kept the core of the character intact and frankly improved and modernized Blade in a lot of ways. Either way, if you haven't seen it, give it a watch. 

Red Text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen

Black Text is your reviewer Garvin Anders