Cody Hamman shares his Film Appreciation for the 1998 Marvel adaptation Blade.
2000's X-Men and 2002's Spider-Man are often credited with paving the way for the modern superhero film, specifically the films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. For decades, the potential of Marvel Comics properties had been squandered on things like the Spider-Man TV show and low budget movies like The Punisher, Captain America, and a Fantastic Four movie that wasn't even released. X-Men and Spider-Man showed what Marvel adaptations could be, if they had some money and care put into them. But there's another movie that deserves credit for helping pave the way, one that focused on a less popular character than the likes of the X-Men and Spider-Man, but was still more impressive than any previous live-action Marvel film had been. That movie is Blade, released in 1998.
I had grown up on those lesser Marvel adaptations, grateful to have the chance to see Marvel characters brought to life on the screen, but always disappointed to some degree. I never understood why the adaptations couldn't live up to the comics. Then along came Blade, which had a shocking amount of money ($45 million in '98 dollars) and care put into it, considering how obscure the title character was. The general audience may not have known who Blade was until this movie was released, but I was familiar with him due to his connection to my favorite Marvel character, the #1 hero of my childhood, Ghost Rider. In 1992, Marvel had made Ghost Rider part of an alliance of heroes called the Midnight Sons, which included a team called the Nightstalkers - a team consisting of the sword-wielding Blade, the heroic vampire Hannibal King, and Frank Drake, a human descendant of Dracula. The members of that trio were all characters that had been introduced in the pages of the comic book Tomb of Dracula back in the '70s, but my introduction to them came in issue #1 of the Nightstalkers series. Nightstalkers only lasted 18 issues, running from November of 1992 to April of 1994, but I read most of those, and of course paid extra attention to the Nightstalkers when they were having crossovers with Ghost Rider, which happened frequently during that year and a half. My impression of Blade from reading those comics was that the character was quite a douchebag, so intense about his mission to wipe out the supernatural that he would even threaten, or flat-out murder, his own friends and allies if they weren't regular humans. There was a five-part storyline called Midnight Massacre in which Blade completely snaps and kills nearly every other hero in the Midnight Sons alliance. (Of course, those deaths were reversed in the end.) So I can't say I liked the guy. But I was interested in seeing his movie because he goes after vampires with swords and other bladed weapons, and that sounds like a good time to me.
What I found when I saw Blade on opening weekend in August of '98 was that director Steven Norrington, screenwriter David S. Goyer, and star Wesley Snipes had done something that no Marvel movie had done before: it lived up to the potential of the source material. Not only that, I actually felt that it improved upon the source material, because Blade was not a likeable character in the comic books I had read, but he was likeable in this movie. It didn't take me long to realize that this film's version of Blade was better than the version I had seen in the Nightstalkers comics; it was obvious by the end of the first action sequence.
Blade starts off with one of the most iconic sequences in action movie history. A young man is lured into a rave that's being held in the back of a meat packing plant. When blood begins to rain down on the ravers from the sprinkler system, this young man discovers that everyone around him is a vampire. The situation is looking dire, until Blade shows up in his black trenchcoat, body armor, and sunglasses, and proceeds to take down a bunch of the vampires through the use of martial arts, bladed weapons, fire, a shotgun that fires silver stakes, and other firearms with modified ammo. The vampires are instantly reduced to ash when Blade slashes and blasts his way through them, which is a way to handle vampire corpses I had only recently seen for the first time, in the likes of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV show and (in its own way) From Dusk Till Dawn.
As soon as I saw Blade smiling and doing celebratory fist pumps in the midst of this action, I knew this was a better Blade than the one I had read about. He had personality! He was capable of having fun (and therefore being fun to watch)! He is still a taciturn badass in the movie, the important distinction is that he's not a raging jerk like he was in the comics of the time.
Blade is able to stand up to vampires better than the average human could because he is part vampire himself. A flashback shows us that he was born Eric Brooks in 1967, and his mom went into labor after being bitten by a vampire named Deacon Frost. The fact that his mother was bitten by a vampire while he was in her womb has turned Blade into a hybrid referred to as the Daywalker; he has all the strengths of being a vampire, but has none of the vampires' weaknesses. When this movie was released, the Blade of the comics was not a super strong Daywalker, his mother being bitten when she was pregnant with him had only made him immune to vampire bites. This film influenced the comics, as Blade became the Daywalker during a crossover with Spider-Man and the "living vampire" anti-hero Morbius in 1999.
Blade uses the abilities he was accidentally given to seek vengeance for what was done to him and his mother - by eradicating vampires. He has been at this "vampire slaying" business for a while by the time we meet him in this film, having been taken under the wing of vampire hunter Abraham Whistler (Kris Kristofferson) at a young age. Whistler has mostly aged out of field work at this point, he stays at their warehouse hideout and works on creating new weapons and improving the ones they already have. Since these vampire hunters are well established, the best way to show what they're all about is to drop an audience surrogate character into the situation, someone for Blade and Whistler to deliver exposition to. This character could have been the young guy who was taken to the rave, but that would have ruined the movie because that guy seems like an idiot. Instead, the audience surrogate character is Dr. Karen Jenson, played by N'Bushe Wright - and she happens to be a hematologist, so there's a chance that her knowledge of blood diseases could be helpful to Blade.
Karen gets involved when the notoriously difficult to kill vampire Quinn (Donal Logue) survives the rave sequence and gets taken to the nearest hospital, since Blade set him on fire and as far as the paramedics know he's a charred cadaver. Unfortunately, Quinn rises in the morgue and attacks both Karen and her ex-boyfriend/co-worker Dr. Curtis Webb (Tim Guinee). Something interesting happens to Curtis, as the bite he receives from Quinn doesn't turn him into a properly functioning vampire like Quinn and the others we see throughout the movie. Something goes wrong with the transformation from time to time, sometimes the bitten turn into less functional, zombie-like vampires, and that's the fate of Curtis. Karen doesn't get it so bad. Blade shows up at the hospital to finish Quinn off, isn't able to because he gets shot at by security guards (to which he responds, "Are you out of your damn mind?", another instance of this Blade being more fun than the comic book Blade I knew), but does manage to get Karen out of there, taking her to his hideout in hopes that she can be saved with a garlic serum that he and Whistler have on hand. So when Karen starts to recover from the bite, Blade and Whistler have some things to explain to her, and the audience along with her.
What we find out is that a treaty exists between vampires and human politicians and authority figures. As long as vampires don't draw too much attention to themselves, they're able to operate freely. Vampires have the local police force in their pocket, and they have human familiars who want to become vampires and will do their bloodsucking masters' dirty work in an effort to earn that prize. But just as we're learning how this all works, there's a movement within the vampire community that shakes up the whole thing. That movement is led by Deacon Frost (Stephen Dorff). That's the vampire who bit Blade's mother thirty-one years ago, but his condition has made him ageless. He's been operating for all these years, but he still acts like a petulant teenager or a disrespectful twenty-something. He doesn't agree that vampires should remain hidden from the outside world. He believes they should be ruling mankind. And he puts a plan in motion that could lead to vampires taking over the world - even though part of the plan involves wiping out the members of a vampire council called the House of Erebus. The councilmembers looked down on him anyway, because he wasn't born a vampire like they were. He was turned.
Frost's scheme involves a legend from the pages of the Book of Erebus, which is referred to as "the vampire Bible". He's going to unleash La Magra. The blood god. Once La Magra is unleashed, the idea is that everyone who comes in contact with this entity will instantly be turned into a vampire. Frost gives the idea that it's going to sweep through the streets of the city, if not envelope the world, turning a whole lot of people. An apocalyptic event. Which causes viewers to nitpick the logic; why would Frost want vampires to so greatly outnumber their prey? How are vampires supposed to exist with hardly any humans to feed on? A deleted scene would have given an answer to this by showing that Frost has humans in storage to snack on after La Magra is set loose, but that still doesn't seem like it would be enough for a world of vampires. It doesn't make a lot of sense, but just go with it.
So Blade's job basically just switched up from pest control to trying to thwart global domination. That's definitely a threat worthy of a feature film, and allows for this movie to be packed with a good amount of action. Most of the sequences aren't as cool as the blood rave, but the quantity makes up for it when they're not on that level of quality. The film has a running time of 120 minutes and Blade begins his raid of the location where Frost will be conducting his La Magra-summoning ritual at 83 minutes, so there is a whole lot of fighting, slashing, and shooting in there.
Frost isn't the only vampire from the Blade's past that he ends up facing along the way. He also discovers that his mother Vanessa (Sanaa Lathan) has been alive this whole time, but as a vampire, hanging out with Frost. On the audio commentary, Goyer says David Fincher was attached to direct Blade at one point, and gave script notes based on the idea that a character who travels the "Road to Enlightenment" must kill their mother, their father, and their mentor. Well, Vanessa and Frost would be the mother and father in this equation, and that bit about the mentor doesn't bode well for Whistler.
The logic may not always be clear, and I'm not so keen on the idea that sunblock is strong enough to allow a vampire to walk around during the day like Frost does in one scene, but in the end Blade is exactly what it needed to be: a highly entertaining, exceptionally well-made action movie. Wesley Snipes did a great job in the title role, and with the aid of Goyer and Norrington he made Blade a better character than he was in the Midnight Sons comics. (I haven't had the chance to read his original appearances in Tomb of Dracula yet.)
If this creative team hadn't done such a good job with Blade, we might not have gotten such good adaptations of X-Men and Spider-Man a couple years later. This movie is just as fitting of an adaptation of its source material as those movies were of their source material, it was a hit that spawned a franchise, and it was better than the other comic books movies we were getting at the time, so Blade is partially responsible for helping superhero movies get to the point they're at now. I've been a fan since '98, but seeing what Blade has led to makes me appreciate the movie even more.
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