I just saw
Dracula 2000 the other night, and I wasn't
that impressed. I mean, it was
entertaining and all, but I thought they
tried to change too much.
WARNING: SPOILER. I mean..come
on..
Dracula has to be
Slavic, and in this movie, they tie the whole
aversion to
Christianity thing to the fact that
Dracula is really
Judas Iscariot.
As if that wasn't enough, whoever wrote the screenplay had seen
Stigmata too
much, as
Dracula was running around leaving messages scrawled in
Aramaic.
Whatever
happened to good old
gothic-themed
vampire stories? :)
On the drive home it hit me that
Yeats would be dancing
a
jig if he'd seen this movie. The
christian/
supernatural themes that
have been popping up in movies lately are a sign that we're aware of the end of
the
millenium.
Yeats of course would say that this is all because
the
beast is coming. It brings to mind the image of the
beast "
sloutching
towards Bethlehem" from his poem
The Second Coming.
Yeats believed
that time was
cyclical, and not
linear. History moves in roughly
2000 year
cycles. It's actually a bit more
complicated. He
believed that it was not just
cyclical, but in fact
spiral, and each
spiral
of history was connected to another with ever-widening
gyres. All very
complex, and
makes you think of
Chrono Cross, or the
Age Lace from
The Wheel of Time
series.
I found it amusing that even something as straight-forward
as
Dracula was somehow infused with this sense of religious
calamity, given
the fact that the new
millenium is days
away :)