10 / 10
9 / 10
8 / 10
The Blade trilogy is the reason superhero films exist in their current form, and almost nobody says so. Blade came out in 1998, two years before X-Men, four before Spider-Man, and it made money with an R rating, a Black lead and a character almost no one outside comics had heard of.
Wesley Snipes plays Blade, born to a woman bitten while pregnant, carrying vampire strength with none of the weaknesses except the thirst. Kris Kristofferson plays Whistler, the weapons man who raised him. Stephen Dorff, Ron Perlman and Parker Posey lead the opposition across the three films.
I have a soft spot the size of a meat locker for these films.
Snipes in that coat, walking into a room full of vampires as the sprinklers start raining blood, is the coolest entrance in any comic book movie, and nothing Marvel Studios has made since has topped it for me. The trilogy gets a 9 because the third film stumbles and the second leans too hard on digital stunts. The first one deserves every point.
As a trilogy it’s a 9. Blade is a 10, Blade II is a 9, and Blade: Trinity, the one everyone enjoys kicking, is an 8.
Blade (1998): 10/10
The opening is still among the best in the genre. A young man follows a woman into a meat-packing plant, down a corridor, into a room full of people dancing, and then the sprinklers come on and spray blood over everybody. It’s a vampire rave, and Blade walks in with a sword.
Stephen Norrington directed from David S. Goyer’s script. The world it builds is complete in twenty minutes: vampire houses with politics and a hierarchy, pure-bloods who inherit and turned vampires who claw their way up, and a hunter who keeps himself alive on serum. It cost about $45 million and made roughly $131 million. Marvel had nothing else working at the time, and this film is the reason they got another chance.
Wesley Snipes
Snipes is the movie. He was a trained martial artist before he was a movie star, and he plays Blade as somebody who is always the most dangerous person in the room and knows it.
The character barely speaks. He glares, fights, says something short and leaves, and I think that restraint is why the performance works so well. Blade is furious all the time and never wastes energy showing it, and I find that far more menacing than any speech Goyer could have written for him.
The costume, the glasses, the armor and the sword became a template. Every leather-coated action hero of the next decade owes something to this design, including one very famous one released the following year.
The Look and the Sound
The first film’s design is all industrial: meat lockers, subway tunnels, concrete, blue-black night. The vampires are rich and modern, running clubs and banks, and the film’s Los Angeles looks like a place where that would go unnoticed.
The soundtrack was as influential as the visuals. The blood rave’s pounding electronic score put drum and bass and house into an American action film at a moment when most studio pictures were using rock, and half the genre copied it within three years.
Del Toro’s sequel goes the other way: Prague locations, wet stone, cathedral spaces and sickly green light. The two films look like they belong to different directors, because they do, and the trilogy is better for it.
For Writers
The blood rave puts you inside the vampires’ world at full speed before any character explains what a vampire is in this story. An opening scene that shows the rules in motion is worth three chapters of setup. When you start a book, drop the reader into a working example of your world’s central conflict and let them piece the rules together. Write your opening as a scene where the system is already running. Cut any sentence that exists to teach instead of to happen.
Blade II (2002): 9/10
Guillermo del Toro took over, and the film is stranger and wetter than the first. A new strain called the Reapers is feeding on vampires, and the vampire nation hires Blade to hunt them. Del Toro’s monsters are the draw. The Reapers have jaws that split three ways, they’re blind in the usual sense, and the autopsy scene is pure body horror in a studio action film.
It’s a 9 from me. The creature work and the Bloodpack squad are excellent, and the martial arts are heavier. My complaint is the digital work in the fight scenes, which has aged badly in a way the first film’s practical stunts haven’t. Whenever a digital Blade pulls off an impossible move, I wish del Toro had trusted his stunt team the way the first film did.
For Writers
Blade II hands the same character to a different director with a different obsession, and the result is a sequel that doesn’t repeat the first film. A series stays alive when each entry brings a real new interest instead of a bigger version of the last plot. When you write a sequel, find the question the first book didn’t ask and build the new story around it. Write down what your first book was about in one sentence. Then write a different sentence for the sequel that still needs the same protagonist. If the second sentence is the first one with higher stakes, you haven’t got a sequel yet.
Blade: Trinity (2004): 8/10
David Goyer directed this one himself, and it’s the most conventional of the three. Blade is framed for killing a human, the FBI comes after him, and a pair of young hunters called the Nightstalkers pull him into their operation. It’s the film people dismiss, and I think it’s better than that. Ryan Reynolds is very funny as Hannibal King in what amounts to a first draft of the persona that made him a star. Jessica Biel’s Abigail Whistler is a decent addition, and Parker Posey plays a vampire leader as a bored socialite.
Dominic Purcell’s Dracula is the weak point, and the plot leans on a virus that never convinces. I still like the film. It’s an 8 because it’s an enjoyable action film with a good cast, Reynolds is a riot, and it’s the only one of the three that gives Blade people to talk to.
The Marvel Foundation
Marvel in 1998 was coming out of bankruptcy and selling character rights to whoever would pay. Blade was an obscure enough property that nobody minded what New Line did with it.
What it proved is what the studios needed to know: a comic property could make money without being a family film, with a lead who wasn’t a household name, and with a tone that matched the source instead of apologizing for it. X-Men followed in 2000, Spider-Man in 2002, and the model everyone now takes for granted was built on the back of a film about a vampire hunter with a sword.
For Writers
Blade proved a market existed before the industry believed in it, and the films that followed took the credit. Being early is rarely rewarded and it’s still worth doing, because the work outlasts the conversation. When you write in a form nobody is buying yet, do it properly, publish it, and let it stand. Look at what you keep postponing because the market seems wrong for it. Write it anyway, and make it good enough that it’s still there when the market turns. Somebody else will get the credit for the trend. You’ll have the book.
The Fights
The choreography across the trilogy is stronger than almost anything else in American action of the period. Snipes trained in Capoeira and Shotokan karate for decades, and the films let him move. The first film’s blade work is clean and comprehensible, with long takes that show what he’s doing. The second film goes wilder and starts using digital assistance for impossible moves, and that looks worse now than the practical stunts of 1998 do.
The third film’s fights are fine and less distinctive. By then everybody had absorbed the style, and the trilogy’s own innovations were the industry standard.
As a Trilogy
Taken together it’s a 9. The first film created a template, the second brought in a major horror director and let him loose, and the third closed it out with a lighter tone and a bigger cast.
They’re also consistent about their central character in a way modern franchises rarely manage. Blade doesn’t have an arc so much as a condition, and every film puts him in a room where somebody wants him to choose a side. The trilogy’s reputation would be higher if Marvel Studios had ever acknowledged it. Instead it sits slightly outside the official history, a strange fate for the film that started all of it, and the snub is petty. Marvel owes this series a thank-you it has never paid.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Blade builds a whole world in its first twenty minutes without a line of exposition: the blood rave, the vampire hierarchy, the serum, the hunter. Everything is shown in use. Drop your reader into a working system and let them infer the rules from what the characters do, and you’ll save yourself fifty pages of explanation.
Is the Blade trilogy as good as people say?
Better, because people don’t say much about it anymore. Blade is a 10, an action horror film that holds up completely. Blade II is a 9, with del Toro’s monsters and heavier fights. Blade: Trinity is an 8 and much better than its reputation.
As a trilogy it’s a 9. The first film is as close to perfect as action horror gets, the second is del Toro enjoying himself, and the third is weaker without ever being the disaster people claim. What keeps it from a 10 is Trinity’s limp Dracula and the second film’s rubbery digital stunts. This is the series modern superhero cinema was built on, and I’d much sooner rewatch it than most of what came after.
