Dracula Untold had a lot of potential. In concept the idea of melding Vlad Tepes' historical war against the Ottoman Empire with the classical vampire mythos could make for one amazing dark historical fantasy, but they didn't quite get the idea off the ground with Untold.
I still think Untold's biggest problem was that no one did more research into the historical Vlad Tepes and Stoker's Dracula background, once they'd settled on their main conflict, and that they were, like many others, still enamored with the idea of Dracula as an anti-Hero, the same basic problem that Maleficent had, but without Disney's machine to overcome it. The story should have been about a protagonist going full Vader, seeking power for ostensibly noble causes, before becoming an even greater threat to those causes. And I'm serious about the research part; a quick perusal of the frickin' Wikipedia pages on Tepes and Dracula produced my intitial (and in my opinion,
better) interpretation of the Dracula Untold trailer:
1. Vlad is already a fairly morally ambiguous character, who's a patriot, but willing to do what the Ottoman's say, until they threaten his son with the same torture he experienced in their care (he
was a hostage of the court alongside his brother, and by all accounts he hated it and was treated more Asa prisoner than his brother), at which point he kills their messengers, hurtling his country into war.
2. Vlad scales the mountains of Walachia to enter the Scholomance, a kind of dark university of black magic run by the Devil himself, wherein the literary Dracula is said to have attended, gained some dark knowledge, and presumably watched as one of his classmates was taken by the Devil in payment. There, he chooses to become a vampire, as he does in the movie, but this time there's a history of black magic in his last already established.
3. Dracula is born as Vlad starts to attack the Ottoman forces with his powers, again like in the actual movie, BUT! Instead of it being Dominic West playing a white-washed version of the sultan, I thought he was playing Radu the Handsome, Vlad Tepes's real life brother and hated rival. This was really irritating when I watched the film; they wanted an antagonistic pseudo-sibling relationship with an antagonist when a
literal anatagonistic sibling relationship already existed and with a kick @$$ name: The
Blood Brothers. And since the historical Radu is ambivalent, I thought they'd show a more subdued and professional adversary who is doing evil things, but the culture he's a part of sees it as progress and moral. A more complex and less pettyRadu would have easily trumped what we got in the film.
4. Dracula starts to give in to his curse while still believing he's a hero, and his feeding on his own people drives his wife to commit suicide to escape him. This was based off the well known story of his wife commuting suicide, but also because I thought that, for some odd reason, a classic movie monster needs to clearly become a monster, and I figured that a tragic way to portray that would be to show his wife choosing to die while pitying her husband as he desperately tries to stop her.
5. Finally, I thought the last part of the trailer made perfect sense as the climax to Dracula's descent into villainy, giving him one last battle against the Ottomans but now already effectively movie Dracula: a human monster all alone in a haunted mountain castle in command of dark powers. I figured they'd show the apex of his heroic might (crushing the Ottoman army) similar to Anakin killing Dooku and rescuing Palpatine to win the battle of Coruscant, but twist it with Ascension of his darker nature (becoming a monster cut off from humanity and only feeding on therm) like in the purge scene. I really though we'd get a scene where the protagonist destroys the anatagonist, but is now
no better than them and maybe worse.
