Welcome to the Century of the Vampire, an ongoing weekly feature where Goonhammer managing editor Jonathan Bernhardt watches some piece of vampire media, probably a movie but maybe eventually television will get a spot in here too, and talks about it at some length in the context of both its own value as a piece of art and as a representation of the weird undead guys that dominate western pop culture who aren’t (usually) zombies.
Last week, Bernhardt reviewed the 2000 Hiroyuki Kitakubo film, Blood: The Last Vampire. Today, Bernhardt looks at the 2021 Warhammer Storyforge miniseries, Angels of Death.
This week, thanks to our look at the Shield of Baal over in the Lore Explainer, it’s a special Warhammer 40K-themed column of Century of the Vampire about Angels of Death, a ten-episode miniseries of roughly twenty minute episodes originally aired in 2021 and starring the Blood Angels, the particularly spooky and vampire-flavored Space Marine chapter from the grim far future that most visitors of this site know so well. I’m an outlier among the shareholders of Goonhammer in that I know a lot more about vampires than I do about Space Marines; I am not a Black Library reader and I do not play main-line 40K (outside of being a warm body in occasional Kill Team matches that need one). Most of what I know about the universe of Warhammer 40K comes from the licensed video games, of which I’ve played basically all, and general osmosis; I am much more of a fan of the Blood Ravens than the Blood Angels, for instance. Even for me, then, a relative novice…Angels of Death was disappointingly thin gruel.
Let’s start with the positives. They’ve made a daring choice to completely remove color from the animation except for red, and only use red when presenting blood or blood-related palettes — Blood Angels heraldry, for instance, or the sky on their homeworld Baal in the one flashback scene we get there — while other things that otherwise would contain the color, such as fire, are rendered entirely in black and white. (There’s one exception to this: all the lastech weapons the corrupted Guardsmen use get to be red as well. There’s no blood connection there; it’s just for legibility and because lasers should be red. I understand it, but I don’t approve.) The show is beating you over the head with the Angels’ obsession with their own blood and the grim doom that awaits them and the rest of the inhabitants of the 40K universe, and this is probably the most effective component of that aesthetic. While it’s an excellent choice both for the content and the mood of the project, it’s also worth noting that the heavy, heavy shadowing it leads to also helps cover for some of the animation’s technical limitations. This was not made on the biggest budget in the world, and the visual style helps with that — though no amount of shadows will make it less obvious that they’ve got one Bald Guy model for basic Guardsmen and cultist mooks they’re using over and over again.
The age warning at the front of each episode says that the series is intended for viewers ages 15+, and I firmly agree with that — in fact, I’d go so far as to say that this is an excellent first introduction to “actual” 40K storytelling and narrative media for a teenager just stepping foot into the grimdark far future. If you’re not really aware of what the whole deal with the Imperium of Man, the Space Marines, and the Tyranids is, Angels of Death will lay it out for you extremely directly and emphatically. There’s a lot less boutique chapter-specific Blood Angels content in the series than I was expecting; outside of a subplot about the Black Rage and the aforementioned scene on Baal where the protagonist, Kazarion, gets advice from Chief Librarian Mephiston (the one actual vampire in this whole deal), it’s a lot of boilerplate Space Marines talk about duty, honor, the geneseed, the glory of serving the Emperor, the glory of dying in battle, and so on. The best sequence in the show is in episode seven, The Honour of Angels, when Tech-priest Castia and Space Marine captain Orpheo engage in a great philosophical debate over the virtues of knowledge against those of duty, outlining for the novice the difference in approach between the Adeptus Mechanicus and the Adeptus Astartes in serving the same master, if in two different aspects. You’ll also learn what the deal with the Genestealer Cults is, I suppose, and some of how they relate to the actual Tyranid host itself; whether that’s a good or a bad thing depends on how you feel about the Genestealer Cults. In that sense, I think it does what it sets out to do very well.
Married to the observation that Angels of Death is a great introduction to the basics of Space Marines and Tyranids for teens is the observation that this is one of the least interesting stories they could have told in this narrative space. The basic plot of the show is that while defending the manufactorum world Viltri from a Tyranid Hive invasion, our heroes on the Sword of Baal receive an order from Chapter Master Dante that they are to return to the chapter homeworld Baal immediately, with no further context. They abandon the forge world and attempt to enter the warp, only for the Cicatrix Maledictum to kick off and stick them in the warp for about two subjective months, which appears to be some hundreds of years to the outside world. They emerge from the warp in the Niades system, which promises them safe harbor; they sidle on up to the docking rig and begin to refuel and resupply. Meanwhile, the Sword receives a priority encrypted distress signal from the surface. Captain Orpheo, leader of the Blood Angels contingent on board, goes down with his honor guard to investigate.
You can probably guess how this goes from here: The Captain goes missing. The rest of the Blood Angels, led by Kazarion and Ancaeus, two formerly-close brothers who spend their time on screen educating the viewer on Space Marine brotherhood and the Black Rage, deploy to find him. The offer of safe harbor was a trap; evil cultists pretending to be laborers sneak on board and tether the Sword to its dock while all the ships in orbit turn on the Sword. The mild twist is that these are xenos cultists and not heretics; they start mutating into Tyranid hybrids as they swarm on board. Some of them kinda look like the goomba guys from the Super Mario Brothers live action movie; others kinda look like Cell from Dragonball Z. Kazarion and Ancaeus reunite with Orpheo, who was saved by a very smug Tech-priest, Castia, and take the fight to the cult and their Tyranid patrons at the base of the space dock tether. The heroes win the day, kill all the bad guys at great cost, nuke the bugs from orbit, and grimly yet heroically depart the Niades system.
In between, there’s a lot of action. A lot of action. Probably too much. The series begins in a perfunctory version of in medias res, where episode one starts with Orpheo already departed for the surface, Kazarion and Ancaeus bickering about whether to go look for him, and the cultists about to spring their trap — but we still see all the previous events, since episode five is an unannounced flashback episode which isn’t even condensed for time and doesn’t provide any new information; it is simply written as if it was the original episode one and they just decided to air it fifth, out of order. That’s because the main goal of the episode isn’t to inform the narrative in any real way — the main goal of the episode is to show you the Terminator guys from the honor guard that you saw dead in episode three up and about shooting stuff.
There’s so much bolter porn in this series; that’s pretty much all it’s interested in doing. It’s fine, as far as it goes, but there are a lot of places you can get bolter porn on top of extremely basic 40K plots — the short fan film Astartes remains a pinnacle of the genre, and it came out over a year before this did. The best bolter porn animations understand that basically anyone can fire a big gun pointed off screen over and over again and intercut it with heads exploding; the real devil is in the details, like the crushing weight of the Space Marine armor and the size and explosive speed that these big monster men have despite that armor. That’s not really in evidence here; the animators understand the assignment when it’s something basic and intuitive, like a squad of Marines heavily tromping through a bombed out city — but when two Marines are in animated conversation and gesturing expansively at each other with their arms, it takes very careful consideration not to have the armor move too quickly or too easily, or to just seem like a cardboard harness they’re wearing on a movie set, while still respecting the characters’ strength. That doesn’t always come across here. To be frank, it doesn’t often come across. Much of the melee combat especially feels formulaic and technical instead of visceral, even when depicting guys getting chainsworded or cleaved with an axe. Near the end of the series, when the principals all start doing sword fights with Tyranids, the production takes a very unsatisfying approach to the foley work — thin wet slicing sounds with all the background noise dropped out, instead of robust impaling squelches.
The writing that is there isn’t bad, per se, but it’s there to do a very specific job. Everyone talks in the sort of British Theatrical Mode from the middle of last century you expect from a boilerplate Warhammer property; not just the Space Marines and their Imperial servants, but the Genestealer Cultists as well, even down to the sneering “Guardsmen” who roll up in tanks to ambush Kazarion and Ancaeus’s rescue team. When Space Marines talk primarily in platitudes and aphorisms, it’s fitting and it makes a lot of sense given the primacy of the Codex Astartes to them in the lore; you can run the character work on that from grimdark warrior-poet on one end, like Demetrian Titus or someone higher up the food chain (but not voiced by Mark Strong), down to “barely literate meathead who learned to read from the Violence Bible and therefore thinks and speaks almost wholly in quotations from the Violence Bible” on the other. The effect is less impactful if everyone talks by generalizing their motivations up into sweeping, sinister quoteables. This is also where my inexperience with the less prominent factions of 40K comes into play; I am sure that in the Black Library, a number of authors have done very good work with the Genestealer Cults (separate from the Tyranids in the main) and made them a distinct thing from Chaos cultists and servants of Tzeentch. That’s not what’s going on in Angels of Death. Everyone in the Niades outfit, from the Magus on down the chain, comes off like a bargain-bin knockoff heretic talking about a rip-off Walmart brand Chaos god. The Tyranids themselves are great — they just need to be monstrous, relentless, and fully alien, and they don’t need hypeman toadies going on and on about The Light and the False Angels and the True God.
As to the intersection of this series and the purpose of this column, I was disappointed at how little vampiring the rank and file chapter Angels seem to engage in. The Black Rage isn’t really a vampire-coded thing, especially not the part where you keel over dead at the end; every Space Marine chapter is obsessed with their bloodline and lineage; even the doomed Chaplain, Rafael, was just a high-morale happy warrior of the sort you usually see as a stock Space Marine trope. Only when Mephiston showed up, looking like Alucard on a heavy, possibly dangerous stack and no cycle, did the “oh right, these are the vampire-type guys!” alarm go off. Perhaps the most vampiric thing about them — Mephiston especially — is that in almost every scene where the Angels talked to each other I thought at least once, “Wait why’s his voice so menacing, and why’s the camera holding here? Is he about to pounce on him?” But no, it turns out Space Marines just like to talk Like That, and holding shots and pauses between dialogue for too-long lengths of time is something the production struggles with across all its characters.
Since I’m a good reviewer, I got through to the end. Outside of the previously-mentioned scene where Castia and Orpheo bicker over philosophy, the Ship Master Livia (the WarhammerTV subtitles say Livia, IMDB says Laveria; it sounds like Livia to me) sections aboard the Sword of Baal are probably the most engaging of the lot. Livia has the same problem a lot of leading women in Space Marine stories have, which is that someone’s been photocopying turn of the century Lucy Lawless over and over again to design them for some fifteen-odd years now, and she has the same competent, subordinate blandness to her character as the rest of her clones. Still, her scenes involve a story progressing and not being wholly weighed down either by high-minded talk of duty and resolve or too much bolter fire; the one Blood Angel she spends most of her time interacting with, the Techmarine Hadrean, is cut from the high arch, droll Ian McKellen-on-stage cloth, and is a refreshing counterpoint to the rest of his fellows darkly inveighing in half-growls about the Black Rage constantly. It’s a fun (“fun”) twist at the end to have Kazarion try to do triumphant good guy sword stuff to the Primarch end-boss only to get cut down and it be Ancaeus who goes out in a burst of Rage to tragically win the day. That gets credit, because it was the second-most obvious thing they could have done instead of the first. A Dreadnaught shows up in the finale; Dreadnaughts in motion continue not to beat the allegations of being Violent British Kool-Aid Men, but it was a fun break from Space Marines firing bolters.
Significant portions of this review are colored negatively by the final cut of this production coming in at just under three hours. That’s too much runtime for too little meat. It’s not bad, though, and again, if you’re at the lower bound of the 15+ age range it’s suggested for, there’s probably a lot here for you. Angels of Death is a fine introduction to what the deal is with Space Marines, and the Blood Angels in particular. But it does leave one feeling there’s more to be done in this kind of sandbox than mash action figures together and holler about God.
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