Movie Review: Vampire Academy

It's been a while since I've done one of these, hasn't it?  Well, I went to go see the newest YA novel to become a major motion picture and the vote's in: it sucked.

Okay, I just had to use that line.  Let's be fair, it could have been a lot worse.  In the rankings of recent YA failures, it was better than Beautiful Creatures but worse than Mortal Instruments.  I would be very surprised to see a sequel made, although I wish it would just so they could cast Adrian.

For the most part it follows the story in the book, but it pulls out everything that makes the book good and turns the movie shallow.  I took my mom to see it with me and she could guess who the villain was from the very start.  She also thought it was confusing, which I would understand.  For someone not so familiar with the books, it would be hard to just stop in and see this film.  They sort of talk about the different kinds of vamps but pretty much leave out how Strigoi can occur.  They also completely disregard the fact that Dhampir can't have children with other Dhampir, which would have helped the movie along a lot.

The actors were all pretty decent (although there were some who just really, really were bad (we're all looking at you, Kirova)) but I would say the choices for Rose and Dmitri were the best.  Easily thought they were who they were pretending to be.

I think if there were any problems here, it was with the writing- while the adaption wasn't bad, it wasn't great- and with the editing.  The scenes felt thrown together and incomprehensible sometimes.  Really, it needed a little more TLC and it would have been much better.

Overall, I'm giving it 3 stars.  If you're a fan, see it because it's definitely worth the watch.  It actually made me think of the books again since it's been a while since I read them and made me want to write some more, so I'm giving it props for sticking to the source material.