Movies and Games (Thoughts, Reviews, and Spoilers)

Firstly the priest's little "I'll redeem you with death" moment. Instead of trying to reason with him, Vlad *threatens* him, and the moment he is exposed everyone he's been protecting turns on him, and I mean *immediately*, there is no time provided for the shock and worry to turn into fear and resentment, they immediately rush to kill him, completely flying in the face of whatever loyalty and trust they had in the man at the drop of a hat.

Next is the sultan's insistence on having a tribute of boys to basically turn into Spartans. Would the tribute not suffice to bribe their own poor peasants for their own children? They don't really touch on the sultan's motivations, and the sultan provides none. Vlad goes to reason with him and he says, "no, I want 100 kids, and and I want your boy too." And they show up to take Vlad's own son first, and not the 100 boys. Even if Vlad planned it, it seems a little haphazard, and kinda weird that the sultan would pay special attention to Vlad's boy before Vlad betrays him. He says himself that Vlad can just make another.

Later on, Vlad loses his wife, and the weird part is how his supernatural speed cannot overcome gravity when he is going *with* gravity to try and save her. That created some dissonance for me.

In that same battle, the army decimates his militia/people, so he then turns the survivors to make allies, and once they all defeat the sultan's forces together, they decide that they want to eat the boy too, and that strikes me as weird. They don't fight the temptation to drink blood, sure, but suddenly they all decide to abandon their loyalty because they love the taste so much? All of them?

Then the priest shows up, he somehow survived the slaughter earlier, the explanation for that is never shown, and it results in some cringy screaming from Vlad's boy as he's given up to the priest for protection. It's not really so much as "Dad plz, no" as it is an attempt to scream until he gets what he wants: apparently to be in mortal danger with his father, who it turns out didn't need to give up the boy as he just parts the clouds to burn himself and all the vampires to ash. The screaming from the child would have made more sense if Vlad foolishly allowed it to slip that he was going to destroy the vampires *and* himself in the process.

Everything else about the movie was okay. Charles Dance is always a treat. They even used the silver from the tribute from earlier when the occupying forces came to take money and demand a tribute of 100 kids, though I'm not sure how the sultan would know Vlad's weakness. This is shoddily skipped over as well, but could be passable as the sultan's soldiers view Vlad as a monster out of myth, and Vlad decimates thousands of his men in the battle before the one in which they face each other for the first time.