The ending
I kind of thought towards the ending Coppola kind of went off the rails and the movie just got too weird. He seems to have a tendency to do this, same thing happened with Apocalypse Now.
shareWhat did you find weird about it?
shareJust the tone and the music, I guess it was consistent with the book but it just felt a lot like the end of Apocalypse Now, seemed to just go off the rails.
shareI guess the carriage chase looks kinda panto, but the fight with Drac and his gypsies is pretty cool, then there’s the dramatic ending where Mina kisses his crusty old demon mouth before lopping off his head.
I found it pretty coherent, whereas Apocalypse’s ending is much more stylised and dreamlike.
I think it was mostly the scene where Dracula's brides are trying to hypnotize Mina and Van Helsing, just really really weird and felt like an acid trip (much like Apocalypse Now). As for the very final scene I felt like it was kind of sad that Mina seemed to be abandoning everyone who was fighting so hard to save her (I wouldn't have felt that way if Dracula wasn't so incredibly unsympathetic) , but I'm guessing things worked out between her and Johnathan in the end because the part of Mina that was Elizabeta went to Heaven with Vlad (or at least that's what the painting at the top of the chapel seems to suggest.
shareI guess the brides scene was pretty weird, but I think Coppola was rendering their hallucinatory powers.
Interesting what you say about the Elizabetha portion of Mina detaching and going to heaven. That whole added storyline of Mina being a reincarnated Elizabetha is quite an absurd convenience, but the whole film is mad so you just go with it.
Exactly, once again that entire scene felt like the ending of Apocalypse Now, just a pure acid trip. I have heard that is an interpretation as to what happened to Mina at the end, it seems she really is the reincarnation of Elizabeta but since the curse was lifted she can now be Mina once again. Again this is speculation as the film doesn't provide a definite answer.
shareWell the attack of the brides is a brief sequence which is somewhat hallucinatory, much like their seductive attack on Harker earlier. I don’t find it derails the film at all but to each their own.
Presumably Mina is and has always been a reincarnation of Liz, so quite what remains after the Liz portion ascends isn’t clear. It’s a somewhat nonsensical notion that Coppola threw in so he can have his sympathetic ‘romantic’ take on Dracula.