Review of Vampire Academy (2014) by Matt H — 27 Jul 2015

Noooooooo. Aghhhh, just no. I am SO disappointed. Before I get into my ranting, I want to preface this by saying that despite the very underwhelming and cliche title, the Vampire Academy book series is phenomenal. I honestly am a huge fan. And I don't praise books (or films) that easily. Seriously, just, leave all preconceived notions based on the title at the door, right now. The book series is one of my favorites of all time. It's dark, action-packed (with just the right amount of dry humor for comedic relief) and the character development is great. It's so easy to immerse yourself in this storyline. OK, so now about the movie. Aghhhhh I just can't. This whole series has such great potential to be written on screen, but it just... flunked. I have several criticisms about this adaptation. Be ready. In no order: one, why the heck did they think it would be a good idea to make this film very Mean Girls-meets-Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets-esque? Just #no. Right there. #No. It's like, the directors completely missed the tone of the series. Remember when I mentioned that it was dark? This brings me to my second point... the casting. I will admit that I enjoyed Zoey Deutsch. She grew on me as I watched the film, and while I can see her as "Rose-esque," I think the she and some of the other actors they casted were too young looking. It just affected the tone of the film, and made everything more petty and underdeveloped... unlike how the story is written in the actual book. Dimitri... gosh, do I love his character in the book, but in the film? What the heck? The delivery of his lines was so flat, I mean to the point where you could confuse the film for a parody when he has screentime. His body language was off too-- nothing like the stoic, confident, brooding, and enigmatic Dimitri in the series. He just kind of reminded me of Mad Eye Moody from HP when he was walking. Also, there just didn't seem to be any chemistry between him and Rose. It was just off. Thirdly, the film was too short/too rushed. There was so much information thrown at the audience in such a short span of time, it would be difficult to understand the plot points if you hadn't read the book. Would have preferred that they used information and took more time to develop the characters more, because that's honestly one of the strongest features of the series. Anyway, there were a couple of other nuisances... I found with this book-to-film adaptation, but I think the main take away is that the way they approached how to represent all of this the film in the first place is what the root problem. I was amused here and there, and did watch the whole thing, but how many of these teeny-bopper paranormal films do we have to have? This series had such strong material to work with... ALL that potential that was there :((((. On the plus side, it reminded me to read the series all over again so I can forget what I watched.

TL;DR: TIL the importance of *recognizing* the tone of a work (as it was so often reiterated to me in my English classes); unfortunately, the people who made the VA film missed these lectures. Sad adaptation on one of my all time favorite book series. I still watched the whole thing tho.