Man, 1998 is so long ago that I first saw the trailer for Blade on E! Television's Coming Attractions show. In an age where people can watch this shit on their phones now, it's nuts to remember a time when it was a useful function for E! to devote a half-hour of their programming to showing the latest movie trailers. I would get pissed if I forgot that show was on! Worse than missing it altogether was if I only caught the very last preview, saw the recap of what they played that week only to find out I missed, like, the Dark City trailer and then have to hope the same episode would be showing again soon.Anyhow, when I saw the Blade trailer, I immediately had a good feeling about the movie. Sure, a good trailer can fool you but Blade just looked incredibly cool to me. It had the right vibe to it. When I saw Blade on its opening weekend, I was ecstatic over how good it was. This is one of those movies where all the elements came together just right. In one swoop, the days of Marvel movies being direct-to-video jokes were over. Better yet, a Blade II was inevitable.
I only wish that director Stephen Norrington had stuck with the series - or at least had returned for Blade: Trinity because, well, that movie sucked hard. I can't hate on David Goyer because Blade wouldn't have been what it was in the first place if he hadn't convinced New Line to go with a serious, big-budget take on the character but man, as for his work as the writer/director of Trinity all I can say is "WTF?" But hey, that's all blood under the bridge now. The way I look at it, it's a minor miracle that both Blade and Blade II (under Guillermo del Toro's direction) were as as terrific as they were.
Who would've ever guessed that out of all the heavy-hitters in the Marvel Universe that Blade would be the first one to be the subject of a great film? So much for putting all my money on Squirrel Girl.
For my full Summer Shocks review of Blade, click here.
2 comments:
Nothing beats the killer opening of the blood shower vampire rave. What a way to open a film! It set the badass tone right from the get-go. And, not surprisingly, Del Toro took it to the next level with his sequel. The less said about TRINITY the better, unless you're talking about Jessica Biel's abs...
Yeah, in the pantheon of cinematic disappointments, Blade: Trinity is one of the more crushing. I love Blade and Blade II so much but then you get to Trinity and it all turns to shit. Snipes deserved a far better wrap-up to his time as Blade. There were all those stories at the time about Goyer having to hire Hell Angel's as protection from Snipes but I don't blame Snipes for being hostile - Goyer was flushing the series down the toilet! But like I say, the fact that we got not one but two great Blade movies counts as a minor miracle.
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