Jonathan Frid as Barnabas Collins
Johnny Depp as Barnabas Collins
In the interest of disclosure, I feel I should explain that I am a very big Dark Shadows fan. While I haven’t finished watching the original series, I have seen 688 episodes to date in the past two years, and am working on finishing it (There are 1245 episodes in all). What this SHOULD mean is that I am horribly biased against any form of remake and would obviously criticize this movie, except that when it comes to remakes, I happen to be very different than the average fan. I tend to view remakes as loving recreations or re-popularizations of a series that presumably someone in charge has a fondness for, and as thus I approach them with hopefulness and a grain of forgiveness. If a remake tries hard to keep the essence of the original or manages to find a unique way to re-envision the original that works, I’ll be the first to note it. It may screw up continuity or have different actors with different ways of playing a character, but when it’s right I don’t care about these things. Examples: Star Trek (Good), Sherlock (Good), Metroid Zero Mission (Good), Castlevania Lords of Shadow (Bad), and uh…well, the fact that I can’t actually think of more bad remakes shows how unbiased I actually am.
Dark Shadows is a movie. While I know that’s the biggest “well duh, Captain Obvious” statement of the century, it is quite possibly the most difficult movie I have ever tried to find an adjective for. This movie is so formulaic (oh good, I found one!) that math professors could teach a class on it. Everything about this movie is copy and paste Hollywood, with comedy, romance, sex, violence, plot twists, and a predictable ending. The problem is that none of these elements stand out to define the movie, none of them are unique, and honestly none of them are very Dark Shadows. I think that’s the part that surprised me the most about this movie, it’s all just very lazy, phoned-in work from Burton, Depp, Carter, and practically everyone else involved…and yet Dark Shadows is THE core of what made Burton and Depp into the people they are today. Both of them grew up watching the show and were
extremely impacted by it, to the point where Depp once stated that Barnabas Collins is why he became an actor, and yet when they finally get the chance to remake it, they don’t even try. Compare this with David Tennant who said that The Doctor was the reason he became an actor, and you can easily see how lost Depp and Burton have become.
Let’s be specific. First of all, the sex. Now I know you’ve all heard the whole “these movies today just have all this unnecessary sex” thing and thought “Oh mom/dad, you just don’t like sex” or “but it IS necessary” or something to that effect. This, however, is not one of those cases, because the sex here is the perfect definition of unnecessary. The sexual moments in the movie don’t make any sense, both for the movie itself and when compared to the original Dark Shadows characters. It isn’t that I look at Dark Shadows and think “there can’t be any sex in this because the original doesn’t have it,” because, while the original didn’t show sex happening, you can rest assured that the sexual tension and suggestion were likely being played out in the world of the offstage imagination. In it’s time, Dark Shadows was a sexy show and many of it’s characters were sexy people, but the writing never placed the sexual tension where it didn’t belong. This movie does, however, and it ruins several key relationship points and makes the whole thing seem very trivial. If you aren’t going to approach sex properly, it will come off as unnecessary, as it certainly does here.
Another key point is with the plot itself. While on the whole the plot is decent, there are changes from the original series that were a little unmotivated at best. I don’t mind if you change things up a little in order to make the story more accessible for the movie-going audiences or to make it fit within the time limit, but these changes didn’t feel as if they addressed any of that. The best example of this is with Dr. Hoffman and Carolyn. Both of these characters are underused, with weird plot twists that don’t relate to either the original series or the movie itself. They’re there to be there, the plot twists make no sense, have no foreshadowing, are barely explained, and are absolutely unnecessary. It felt like the writers said “Hey, let’s try this!” and Tim Burton didn’t have the directorial foresight to say “Neat idea, but it’s not going to work, take it out.” In fact, it seems that at many points in this movie Tim Burton really didn’t bother taking control of anything, with a directorial vision that’s in severe need of some bifocals.
Which brings us the biggest travesty of them all. Barnabas Collins. Watching this movie has made it PROFOUNDLY clear to me that Johnny Depp is, like most actors, brilliant but in need of clear direction, and Tim Burton doesn’t seem to have that anymore. As an actor, looking back at some of his previous roles, it is clear that Depp has everything it would take to make the absolute perfect Barnabas Collins, and yet he somehow managed to muddle it all up. It’s as if Depp just decided he was going to try everything he could think of here, and Burton just said “Sure, yeah, ok, we’ll keep that” without any concern for how it meshes with the character. Barnabas Collins is intelligent, resourceful, highly adaptive, and kind when allowed to be, showing mercy and remorse even in the midst of his urges. Depp’s version of Barnabas fails to be all of these, as his power comes mostly from stored up money, he consistently falls into traps, is plagued by the 1972 “fish out of water” schtick, and seems to show no remorse at all even when trying to show remorse. When he is forced to kill, he SAYS that he regrets it and wishes he could stop, but Depp’s performance plays it with a nonchalance that makes his words sound utterly hollow. There are several times in the movie where Depp shows a glimmer of Barnabas shining through his performance, and you realize that he COULD be amazing in this role, if only someone would bother helping him make strong acting choices. This is basic actor/director college-level stuff, and yet Burton seems completely gone here.
In the end, I would say that Dark Shadows, as a movie, is decidedly and profoundly ok. The cinematography is fantastic, the visual effects are good, the plot is mostly decent. If it were a standalone movie with no history behind it, it would probably get a mediocre, matinee worthy review. But this is DARK SHADOWS, this is a show that inspired a generation of gothic horror fans such as Tim Burton or Anne Rice to create rich, dark ideas. It’s honestly hard to find the love for the original Dark Shadows when you watch this movie, and that’s the shame of the century.
ateliermichi 