The film consisted of a very well-developed "mood" stretched out over about 90 minutes. Sort of unusual for such a gruesome vampire film. The "mood" is hard to characterize; it's the sort of contradictory hope and despair of adolescence, combined with longing, danger, and uncertainty. Being set in a vampire apocalypse, it felt like a sort of daydream I might have had when I was 16 years old.
It really needed a story or novel idea to develop. It's weird; I was glued to the screen for the first 30 minutes, and I think the quality of the film was consistent throughout, but I got progressively less interested as the additional fight scenes and deaths rolled out. Towards the end, there was a "boss fight" of sorts; I can hardly remember it. The antagonists were one-dimensional bad guys, the good protagonists were one-dimensional good guys, and the "story" was pretty much just a road trip without any clear objective.
The best thing about the film was the nostalgia it created surrounding adolescence. The young male protagonist was an everyman of sorts; this is the one area where the absence of meaningful dialog worked in the film's favor. The placement of an entirely generic adolescent male at the center of a romanticized, dangerous, fantasy world allowed the film to feel sort of like an aimless daydream.
That's also, really, the worst thing. I imagine I could have watched any random 30-minute segment and gotten the complete experience.
It really needed a story or novel idea to develop. It's weird; I was glued to the screen for the first 30 minutes, and I think the quality of the film was consistent throughout, but I got progressively less interested as the additional fight scenes and deaths rolled out. Towards the end, there was a "boss fight" of sorts; I can hardly remember it. The antagonists were one-dimensional bad guys, the good protagonists were one-dimensional good guys, and the "story" was pretty much just a road trip without any clear objective.
The best thing about the film was the nostalgia it created surrounding adolescence. The young male protagonist was an everyman of sorts; this is the one area where the absence of meaningful dialog worked in the film's favor. The placement of an entirely generic adolescent male at the center of a romanticized, dangerous, fantasy world allowed the film to feel sort of like an aimless daydream.
That's also, really, the worst thing. I imagine I could have watched any random 30-minute segment and gotten the complete experience.