Blade is Really Cool

I recently watched Blade (1998), and this post will mostly serve as an opportunity for me to show you some amazing, super cool stills taken from this stylish movie.

There's Blade.

It has such a perfect 1990s comic book gothic flashiness, this gorgeous movie. The whole thing is very blue, sort of computer-y, and filled with dismal, murky warehouse spaces. There is a great sense of the industrial running through it, extending to Blade's own chunky belts and equipment. His life as a weird inbetween creature, not quite human, not quite vampire, is reflected well in the movie's focus on flesh meshed with machinery. One must imagine listening to the Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft  album 1st Step to Heaven (1986) in its entirety while traversing these vampiric environments. After all, we do spend time in the club, naturally.

There is a point past which an action movie throwing itself hard into stark, intense models of masculine coolness crosses over into a certain camp madness, and while this may not have made sense or been as true when Blade was initially released, it now feels like such a thickly 1990s film that the distance in time lends a heavier quality of heightened performance to it. That long, sweeping trenchcoat was absolutely on trend and futuristic in 1998, but now it has a distinctly faraway, retro feel that arguably makes it even cooler. The artifice of coolness is somewhat exposed by the precision of Blade as a timepiece. But paradoxically, the exposure only adds, only makes Blade's tough demeanour and legendary look more elusive.

One thing I love about this movie is its normal human woman, Karen. She's a hard-as-nails hematologist, she also wears a leather jacket, and she maintains a gorgeous steely stillness throughout every insane event that reveals itself to her. She gets bitten up by a vampire and injected with the ouchie juice that will help her to not die, and she barely flinches. She's a sort of sidekick and everywoman, but she has every ounce of the tough exterior that Blade does, and possibly ten times the smarts and ingenuity. She's gonna do whatever she needs to do with blood experiments. She's like if Elizabeth Holmes was actually really cool and doing something.

Blade is satisfying on many levels, then, but perhaps most of all in its special effects. The fleshy, bloody masses, the peeling skeletons, the sheer inventive violence of it all - it's remarkable. I like to watch these dastardly Euro-vamps explode weirdly. That's really good to me.

Three bubbling, bursting vampires out of five. 

★★★☆☆