Review: Netflix’s Castlevania Season One
Netflix’s Castlevania has a promising beginning, but a beginning is really all the brief first season is.
Video games being adapted into other mediums has been happening for decades. And for the most part, the results have been pretty messy. Some books have been kind of ok, but comics, TV shows, and movies have mostly been abysmal train wrecks that make people wary of any future attempts. This is why it was sort of surprising when it was announced that Castlevania was getting its own series on Netflix.
Still, Netflix is known for mostly quality original programming. Many of the series made exclusively for the streaming service are extremely popular, critically acclaimed and award-winning. So if anyone can make a good series based on a video game, it’s probably Netflix, right?
Well, while I can say that without a doubt, Castlevania is the best series based on a video game to date, that’s not exactly a high bar. The potential is certainly there for something great, but the series only really gets going right as it’s over.
I’m not hugely into Castlevania as a series, but most people should know the basics. Dracula is a bad guy super vampire who drinks people’s blood and commands an army of ghouls and demons. The Belmont family are the ones who stop him. In this version, it kind of already starts in the middle.
See, Dracula has become sort of a hermit who hates humanity but doesn’t actively want to seek out and kill every last one. One night, a charming and inquisitive human woman wanders into his castle, wanting to unlock the deeper secrets of the universe, in order to become a great doctor and help people. This woman greatly intrigues Dracula, and rather than simply kill her as he would any regular human wandering into his territory, he does, in fact, decide to show her the great secrets he knows.
This, of course, does not bode well for the young woman sadly, as the townspeople literally burn her at the stake for being a witch for basically consorting with Dracula. Dracula is unable to save her but swears vengeance upon mankind as a whole in one year’s time.
Where are the Belmont’s during all this? Well, the church basically decided they don’t like sharing power with others, so despite all their good deeds and centuries of hunting demons, The Belmont clan has essentially been extinguished. Only Trevor Belmont, the last son, seems to remain, and he’s not too keen on helping people these days…
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Sounds like a pretty solid beginning, right? And with only four episodes of the first season of Castlevania, that’s all we get: a beginning. I don’t want to spoil anything more, but after a couple more key character introductions, that’s pretty much the show. It’s a two-hour pilot and it seems like there should be a lot more. Netflix barely dipped its toes in the water. Granted, it’s already renewed Castlevania for a second, longer season but this seems like such a huge tease. I’m not saying they had to confront and kill Dracula already, but so little happens in these episodes it’s almost like you’ll have to wait until season two to see if all that setup was worth it in the first place.
That being said, what’s here is pretty good. The voice casting is solid, with Richard Armitage as Trevor Belmont doing most of the heavy lifting. Matt Frewer is also great as a very self-important bishop. The animation is top-notch, but also incredibly and arguably unnecessarily gory. I can enjoy gore, but when it’s every other scene it loses a lot the impact. It’s hard to tell what Castlevania will become, but it’s a good enough start that you should probably check it out and just hope season two can move faster now that most of the setup has been taken care of.