Movie Review: Byzantium (2012)

Byzantium is a unique take on vampire lore. While it’s not exactly a great movie, it is definitely interesting, and Neil Jordan provides some truly arresting visuals.

The two leads — Gemma Arterton and Saoirse Ronan — are excellent. They play completely different characters, with Ronan being the shy and sympathetic one, and Arterton playing the much more seductive and dangerous one. They’re both vampires, of course, but Ronan’s character doesn’t seem to be happy about it.

While I definitely enjoyed the movie, I wish it had more of a straightforward story. The movie has a bunch of flashbacks, but most of the information these provide doesn’t directly affect what’s going on in the present time when it’s presented. I think they could have potentially done it all in one scene, and that would have helped with the story’s momentum a bit. It would have been a long scene, of course, but all the stuff in the past is pretty interesting, so I think it could have worked.

Rating: 6/10