Director: Mark Waters
Release date: 2014
Contains spoilers Universally panned – it appeared – but still with some form of fan-base I walked into Vampire Academy cold, having never read the books it is based on, having zero expectation and not really too bothered about seeing it. I had read it was kind of a supernatural Mean Girls and I assume that is accurate (having never seen Mean Girls).
I was thus pleasantly surprised as I didn’t hate it. I didn’t love it either, to be fair, but it had its moments and its confusing aspects, for the uninitiated, as well.
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| Zoey Deutch as Rose |
The film starts with the Dragomir family, in a car. The focus of the film being daughter Lissa (Lucy Fry) and her friend/guardian Rose Hathaway (Zoey Deutch) who also travels with them. A drunk driver careens across the road, causing a crash. Lissa crawls bleeding and clutches on to Rose’s hand… Two years on and the two girls are on the run from their school, St Vincent’s Academy. The two girls are psychically linked and Lissa was dreaming of the car crash that killed her family.
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| Lissa feeds |
Lissa hasn’t fed and Rose offers her a vein (something we hear that is taboo), for Lissa is, of course, a vampire. In this case she is a type of peaceful vampire called Moroi and actually one of the royal bloodlines. Rose is a dhampir – a half vampire sworn to protect the Moroi. Rose spots a man outside and realises that the guardians from the Academy have found them. They try to escape and make a good fist of it, that is until Rose battles a particular guardian called Dimitri (Danila Kozlovsky) – who easily defeats her.
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| stake |
Rose awakens in a car and Dimitri notices the psychic link between the two girls. They reach the Academy but the gates are closed and the guardians are soon fighting Strigoï. If the Moroi are peaceful vampires, who do drink blood but don’t kill and can walk in sunlight (with minor irritation) then Strigoï are those Moroi who have killed, they become ruthless, psychopathic and burn in sunlight. They are also very physically powerful. The dhampir are trained to protect the Moroi from them and Rose (who failed to stay in the car as ordered) is nearly got but Dimitri saves her – staking the Strigoï with a silver stake.
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| shopping |
Once back at the Academy the two girls are deemed as pariahs as the social structure has shifted – in a high school way – during their absence. It is clear that there was more to their disappearance than even the girls know (and that they were manipulated psychically to leave) and Lissa struggles with an unusual set of magic gifts that do not fall in the normal elemental range. She is also rather good at mind control and manipulation and uses this to get her social standing back (here we have the supernatural Mean Girls aspect) but whatever they were being protected from is still out there.
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| psi hound |
There were interesting aspects – vampire fans taking a year out as willing donors and then mind-wiped of the experience, for instance, and the taboo of drinking from vampires and half vampires (which leads to the donor being known as a Blood Bitch). But there wasn’t enough explanation of the Christian aspects (the Moroi go to church and have a patron saint), there were creatures called psi hounds that were not really explained either (other than they are difficult to train and dangerous) and it just felt occasionally that there were gaps in the backgrounds that a fan of the books would know but the casual viewer does not.
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| training |
The overarching story was interesting enough, I guess, but the identity of the villain was fairly obvious. However I felt that Zoey Deutch gave a fine and sassy performance that lifted parts of the film when they flagged a little. The appearance of a vampire queen (Joely Richardson) was a bit excruciating as the film veered towards Monster High level of childish bitchiness. There was a further story ready to arc in the background about an army of Strigoï that was more interesting to me than the main film but so very sparse.
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| Strigoï |
Over all it wasn’t as bad as some teen orientated vampire films, perhaps there was a punch it needed that wasn’t quite there but it was ok. I can’t really tell if it was novel accurate or whether it did the book a disservice.
5 out of 10.
The imdb page is
here.
