Blade

Release Date: August 21, 1998

Watch Date: August 7, 2023

“A half-mortal, half-immortal is out to avenge his mother’s death and rid the world of vampires. The modern-day technologically advanced vampires he is going after are in search of his special blood type needed to summon an evil god who plays a key role in their plan to execute the human race.“

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    Here’s a first for Avenger’s August, an actual superhero.

    I say that with a grain of salt, as I’m pretty sure Blade is meant to be an anti-hero, and anyways, this is back in the strange backwards world where DC was releasing comic book style colorful and fun Batman movies and Marvel was apparently greenlighting serious pieces full of grayscale color palates and drama.

    That’s right, I bet you forgot that DC films didn’t used to take themselves so seriously.

    I don’t know what made the tables turn for them, but what I do know is that it happened too late to save Blade.

    This is probably our goriest movie to date, something I was prepared for and still flinched away from every time it happened. You’d think the bad CGI would make the people exploding or the gross pile of flesh getting burned or any of it a little bit easier to swallow, but it’s not. It’s all bad. People bleed out, people have their throats ripped open. This movie does not pull any punches.

    Which, I think, in retrospect is a good thing. Blade is sort of like a weird Batman type character, only he absolutely will kill, and he has no money and he has actual super human powers. Okay, maybe not like Batman. But he wears all black, has a lot of gadgets, a gravelly voice and takes himself way too seriously. So he would only fit in a movie that takes himself too seriously. I try to imagine him meeting later MCU characters like Thor or Spider-Man or Deadpool and I just can’t imagine it going to well. Not in like, it would end up in a fight kind of way, but more in a no one is getting along and he’d probably try to kill Deadpool a few times now that I think about it.

    Surprising no one, because I am a female who grew up in the Twilight era – though I hate those novels – I like vampire stories. What I like most is how each and every vampire story has it’s own lore, it’s own way the creatures of the night function. Blade tries to set out a really deep and complex system of government and why vampires are the way they are – it being a virus that can also become a genetic difference is very interesting. But none of it is explained very well. Possibly that’s because our main villain is someone who doesn’t care about the lore of the world he lives in and mostly wants to upend it as much as possible. Possibly because Blade is based on a comic book series with well established rules and if you want to know more about it you should probably just go read that. But I’m not going to, I want to understand my movie lore in the moment, not have to go a wiki page to figure it out.

    The villain, Bob very quickly pointed out, does look like he belongs in a boyband. He walks that thin line of highly intelligent and also insane that I like in my grimdark movies. When the hero has no moral qualms, you have to find a way to make the villain even worse. Willing to murder everyone at the drop of a hat because he feels bullied by pure blood vampires you wouldn’t think is enough motivation, but it does to turn out to do it’s job fairly well.

    This movie came out just before ‘The Matrix’ and it feels like it did. There’s some slowed down bullets, some highly choreographed fight scenes that look extremely cheesy a couple decades out. Everyone walking around wearing leather or long trench coats, an extremely grey color palate and sunglasses that are too tiny for the face that’s wearing them. I refuse to believe that was late 90s early 00s fashion. People should have known better.

    This is one of Bob’s comfort movies, so I suppose I’m going to have to get used to watching it, and honestly it’s not that bad to watch something with a lot of gore that tries out the occasional jump scare when you’re with someone who will hold you while they laugh at you cowering. It’s never going to be my favorite film by any means, and I think it’s a little too corny to even be considered a good one, but I respect his love for it. His fond memories of watching it – before age 9, bad choices were made here – with his biological father that he would later be taken across the continent from. Movies are magic in that way, even really silly vampire ones where everyone uses a katana why, why, why action movies of this period? What is your obsession with the katana??