by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s “feature” was Underworld: Awakening, fourth and most recent in the cycle of modern-dress
horror films featuring ongoing battles between vampires and werewolves (or
“Lycans,” as they’re called here) that in the first two episodes, Underworld and Underworld: Evolution (there doesn’t seem to be any particular point in
the two adjectives), managed to take place — inexplicably — under the radar of
ordinary humanity despite the carnage wreaked on both sides. The film was
directed by a Swedish duo named Måns Mårlind and Björn Stein, and the writing
credits are an indication of just how jumbled the process of creating a series
like this becomes when it gets to episode four: Kevin Grevioux, Len Wiseman and
Danny McBride get credit for creating the original characters, Wiseman and John
Hlavin for writing the story and Wiseman, Hlavin, J. Michael Straczynski and
Allison Burnett for the actual script. Wiseman also directed the first two
episodes, Underworld (2003 —
they’ve all come out at three-year intervals from each other) and Underworld:
Evolution, and the two subsequent films
have suffered from his withdrawal from the director’s chair even though as a
premise (not so much as an actual film) Underworld: Awakening is, or at least had the potential to be, the best
film in the series since the first one.
The premise this time is that ordinary
humans, including the ordinary humans in political power, have become aware of the existence of a conflict between
vampires and werewolves — excuse me, Lycans — and the authorities have mounted
a campaign to wipe them out. The writing committee draws veiled but nonetheless
unmistakable parallels between this and the Holocaust — particularly in the use
of the pronoun “it” to describe a vampire or Lycan and the reference to
vampirism and lycanthropy as “infections” that are incurable, and whose victims
must therefore be wiped out for the good of the rest of humankind. In the
opening sequence, Selene (Kate Beckinsale), soldier in the so-called
“Death-Dealer” force of vampires (and who in the previous installments in the
series has slaughtered virtually all the elders of the vampire clan after
discovering they’ve tried to get rid of her), gets captured by what appears to
be a group of human scientists working for a company called Antigen that’s
ostensibly seeking to devise a vaccine against the vampire and Lycan infections.
Selene’s lover from the first two episodes, Michael Corvin (played in the first
two Underworld films by Scott
Speedman but only a spectral presence here), a so-called “hybrid” containing
both vampire and Lycan genes and also the father of Selene’s daughter Eve
(India Eisley) — though that’s getting ahead of the story — is also captured
and the two are kept in suspended animation in frozen sarcophagi for 12 years
until an assistant at the lab sets her free.
She’s called “Subject No. 1” and
there’s a “Subject No. 2” also being held in captivity in the lab, which is run
by Dr. Jacob Lane (Stephen Rea from The Crying Game and V for Vendetta), who turns out — we realize it almost as soon as we see her, but it
takes Selene about halfway through the movie before she catches on — is her
daughter Eve, who was taken away from her at birth by the human baddies. During
the main part of the film, the human authorities are aware that vampire covens
still exist but are convinced they’ve at least made the earth Lycanrein — only the Lycans are also still around, living in
underground tunnels, and as we eventually discover the lab that we originally
thought was being run by humans is actually a Lycan project (Jacob Lane is
actually a Lycan in human guise) and what they’re really working on is a
vaccine that will render Lycans invulnerable to silver, the only substance that
can kill them (which is why Selene’s guns, blazing away with far more rounds
than small arms could actually contain in the real world, are loaded with silver
bullets). Once they do this, the Lycans will be able to take over the world and
exterminate the remaining vampires and all humans as well. Alas, the potentials for both pathos and social
comment in this plot are pretty much neglected in favor of what can only be
called action porn; the exposition, what there is of it (most of it coming from
Kate Beckinsale’s mouth as she explains to us what’s going on and why), is
really just to keep the plot in motion so we can watch Beckinsale in that
incredibly hot leather outfit, high-tech pistols in both hands blazing away,
and when she’s not firing she’s performing acrobatic feats far in excess of
what any human could pull without the aid of CGI.
Underworld:
Awakening is a genuinely entertaining
movie, but it’s one modern film that could actually have benefited by being longer: its official running time is 88 minutes but if you
subtract the 10-minute closing credit roll, it’s only 78 minutes long — not
that much longer than your average 1930’s or 1940’s “B,” and a longer running
time might have allowed the writing committee to get more drama and genuine
pathos from their story line instead of cutting everything else short to
concentrate on action, action, action. Given the underwhelming box-office
reception of the third film in the sequence, Underworld: Rise of the
Lycans (actually a prequel rather than a
sequel), I’d been surprised when an Underworld IV (incidentally the makers deserve points for not sticking numbers on the ends of these things and
instead giving them at least somewhat separable titles!) materialized and was
even more surprised watching this one to find an open-ended ending (Michael
Corvin has been released from his ice prison, though we still haven’t seen him)
that’s clearly designed to set up an Underworld V. I’ve liked the series so far — the “look” of these
movies, and in particular their genuinely creative use of color (they’ve shown
that one can do convincing Gothic
in color without making everything either blood-red or dirty-brown), has been
quite appealing and one of their most surprising features — but somehow they
don’t seem as interesting compared to the Twilight movies and all the films and TV shows about
“sensitive” adolescent vampires the success of Stephenie Meyer’s cycle has
inspired.
