Thursday, August 21, 2014

Vampire Academy Movie Review

Go watch the movie for yourself at amazon
Vampire Academy
Vampire Academy (2014) Poster

From imdb.com 
Rose Hathaway is a Dhampir, half human-half vampire, a guardian of the Moroi, peaceful, mortal vampires living discreetly within our world. Her calling is to protect the Moroi from bloodthirsty, immortal Vampires, the Strigoi. 
First reaction to this movie is that it's just trying to replicate the Twilight series, right? That's what everyone thinks now in days when every a new young adult book to movie comes out. I wouldn't say it's anything like Twilight besides the fact that they have vampires and are in high school. Besides that, it's more of an actual high school scenario if there was a vampire high school. It depicts your standard high school cliques and love life issues along with political vampire authority power.

When the movie first starts off, it seemed like a low budget indie film and nothing really made sense. It gives you a flashback before any of the characters are established or any background on who is a vampire and what the world is like. It left me completely confused for the first ten minutes or so. The relationship between Rose and Lissa are besties and tbh it seemed like there was a bit more going on there. Their conversations felt forced and Rose's actress, Zoey Deutch, had this thing where she was trying to say oneliner catchphrases for everything she said. I read another review that said that she sounded like a wannabe Ellen Paige in Juno. I wouldn't go that far, because Juno had a right amount of sass. Rose sounded like she was constantly on the defense (which in her right is ok), but to someone who is watching...it was very difficult to keep watching.

Since I didn't read the book, I don't know how they differ much, but I felt like the movie did have a fast pace and things were missing of course. The other characters which I assumed had a bigger part in the book were there and gone in two minutes and it made me uncomfortable for characters to just accept things the way they are because the movie didn't have enough budget or something. tbh I think most of the budget was spent on renting the castle (if not, really good cgi), and could have done a better job with the script.

The action scenes in the movie are actually surprisingly fun to watch, and it gave the film a bit of hope to the strange casting. Seriously though. One of the actors is like a look a like Edward Cullen. It was too freaky to see how the movie was trying to force the Twilight way of success on to another story which I think would do wonderfully (might be too much of a strong word) on its own.

In the end, I did get to enjoy the movie with some serious giggles at how ridiculous Rose's character was and the joys of watching your typical high school drama movie probably geared more towards tweens. It made me want to read the book when the movie ended because yes, there is a cliff hanger. Whether I think there will be a sequel? I doubt it. I know it bombed in theaters internationally and didn't make nearly enough as they were hoping. I might listen to the audiobook sometime later while doing chores around the house or something, but I would not dedicate a full sit down read of this series, because it's not for me. I just want to see how it ends because cliffhanger.

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