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UNDERWORLD: AWAKENING
Rating:  ½
USA. 2012.
Directors – Mårlind & Stein, Screenplay – Alison Burnett, John Hlavin, J. Michael Straczynski & Len Wiseman, Story – John Hlavin & Len Wiseman, Producers – Gary Lucchesi, Tom Rosenberg, Len Wiseman & Richard S. Wright, Photography (3D) – Scott Kevan, Music – Paul Haslinger, Visual Effects Supervisor – James McQuade, Visual Effects – Celluloid Visual Effects Berlin (Supervisor – Michael Landgrebe), Faction Creative (Supervisor – Chris Van Dyck), Fido (Supervisor – Kaj Steveman), Furious FX (Supervisor – David Lingenfelser), Look Effects (Supervisor – Max Ivins), Luma Pictures (Supervisor – Vincent Cirelli), Mokko (Supervisor – Alain Lachance), Ntropic (Supervisor – Andrew Singara), OIV-Oyster Technologies India, Rodeo (Supervisor – Sebastien Moreau), Spin VFX (Supervisor – Jeff Campbell), Special Effects Supervisor – Joel Whist, Prosthetics – Masters FX (Supervisor – Todd Masters), Production Design – Claude Paré. Production Company – Lakeshore Entertainment/Sketch Films.
Cast:
Kate Beckinsale (Selene), Michael Ealy (Detective Sebastian), India Eisley (Subject 2/Eve), Stephen Rea (Dr Jacob Lane), Theo James (David), Charles Dance (Thomas), Sandrine Holt (Lida), Kris Holden-Ried (Quint)
Plot: After centuries of their secret war, the existence of the vampires and Lycans has come out into the open, to which humanity has responded with all-out extermination of both species. Selene and Michael Corvin attempt to flee to safety aboard a freighter only to be cornered at the docks and he shot. She comes around twelve years later after having been placed in cryogenic suspension at Antigen Labs. She makes an escape with the aid of a mysterious young girl. She meets another vampire David who takes them to refuge with the few remaining vampires that live in secrecy beneath the city. There Selene realises that the girl is her own daughter, a vampire-werewolf hybrid that has been cloned from her tissue. The lair is then raided by Lycans and the girl snatched. Selene goes into action to rescue her daughter from the Antigen laboratory where Dr Jacob Lane is preparing to dissect her as a vital part of a Lycan conspiracy.
The Underworld series is one, like the Resident Evil series, that continues to keep producing entries despite nobody in the world seeming to like them. Both series are predicated on pounding action and a maximum of stylish poses, usually involving a heroine in skintight costuming going up against creatures in slow-motion twirls, and a minimum of rationale and connecting plot or sense. Some of the poses and action set-ups on either film could be interchanged without making any difference. Both series continue to churn these content-free sequels out oblivious to the almost universal degree of dislike that exists out there in the fanboy blogosphere that the films seem to be pitching themselves to. Somewhere there must be enough fans that enjoy these films for the producers to keep making more but they seem remarkably silent about it. Both series have also released their most recent entries – Underworld: Awakening here and Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010) – in the 3D process, a gimmick that a good many creatively threadbare series have latched onto as a means of generating more money at the box-office by offering their tired tricks in the third dimension.
Underworld is the creation of Len Wiseman, previously a production assistant at Centropolis Effects who managed to get together a $22 million budget to make his directorial debut with Underworld (2003). This was an okay effort for what it tried to do, where Wiseman served up a slick series of Gothique action poses – if not exactly something that set the world alight in terms of original ideas. Underworld did earn a not immodest $51 million in box-office return and this prompted the funding of the much bigger-budgeted sequel Underworld: Evolution (2006), which is the point where Len Wiseman and the series discovered CGI and turned everything into an overblown effects spectacle. Len Wiseman departed the series to direct Live Free or Die Hard (2007) and the upcoming remake of Total Recall (2012), leaving the next entry, the lacklustre prequel Underworld: Rise of the Lycans (2009), under the tutelage of creature effects creator Patrick Tatopoulos. This was a point where the Underworld series should have had the good grace to retire – its indifferently sketched mythos had so little substance that audiences could care less about its back history.
Despite all good sense, Underworld has managed to churn out another sequel with Underworld: Awakening. (Moreover, the open ending and unfinished story clearly paves the way for an even further sequel). Len Wiseman is present as co-writer and co-producer, while the directorial reins have been handed over to the Swedish duo known Mårlind and Stein (M&ns Mårlind and Bjorn Stein) who had previously directed the film Storm (2005) set in a world that blurred between videogame and reality and the historical tv mini-series Snapphanar (2006) in Sweden, before coming to the US to make the confused horror film Shelter (2010). For a film that regards scripting as an unnecessary evil, the production has managed to bring on board some reasonable writers, including Alison Burnett, the writer of Autumn in New York (2000), Untraceable (2008), the remake of Fame (2009) and Gone (2012), and especially J. Michael Straczynski, a cult name as creator/writer of the science-fiction tv series Babylon 5 (1992-8), who was also nominated for a host of awards for his script for one of Clint Eastwood’s best films, the crime drama Changeling (2008) and most recently contributed to the scripts for Ninja Assassin (2009) and Thor (2011).
Underworld: Awakening is fairly much business as usual for the series. The script shifts the concept around somewhat – rather than a secret war across the ages, the vampire-Lycan war has come out into the open and been discovered by humanity. This follows the trend in other vampire films and tv of the moment – works like The Breed (2001), Perfect Creature (2006), tv’s True Blood (2008– ), Daybreakers (2009), Priest (2011) and to some extent the Twilight series – which have tried to go beyond the questions that vexed earlier eras regarding first the discovery and combating of vampires and then how they might live in the modern world to the question of how vampires and humanity might co-exist together. Disappointingly, the script (such as it is) does almost nothing with the concept except having humanity massing all effort to exterminate both vampires and Lycans. Even so, very little of this is depicted – it is only there as prologue, while the rest of the film takes place a few years later where all of this is peripheral. The rest of the story seems to be, as most of the other Underworld films are, generated from the cliches of the genre – the vampires as a hunted underground; Kate Beckinsale defying the tradition-bound vampire hierarchy; cloning and genetic experiments to produce species hybrids (despite much urgency about the experiments being conducted on India Eisley, the film never deigns to tell us what they are designed to achieve); even the basic concept from Breaking Dawn Part 1 (2011) of the heroine finding she has/is about to give birth to a crossbreed child that is bringing both the werewolves and vampires to the point of war. Despite the calibre of writers on the script, all of this feels presented in a tired way that has been done before and is entirely lacking in any originality of ideas.
Underworld: Awakening occasionally does better in terms of the action scenes. The hiring of Mårlind and Stein has surprisingly enough added an injection of originality that has (to some extent) revitalised the series. Len Wiseman made the poses and action scenes seem stylish in the first film but these were subsequently drowned out by the various visual effects houses in Underworld: Evolution and Rise of the Lycans. Mårlind and Stein seem to be trying to return somewhat to the first Underworld, albeit with a healthy dose of poses borrowed from the Resident Evil series to make Underworld: Awakening move as though it were the equivalent of a videogame up on the big screen (as opposed to an effects heavy vehicle). Alas, polished and all as the individual action sequences are, one strains to even remember anything memorable about any of them an hour after watching the film.
The other thing that Underworld: Awakening does surprisingly well is the 3D. This is a process that has made me extremely cynical about movie-going in the last year in the way that it has been badly used and has become a de rigeur process for a substantial number of films, most of which offer almost nothing when one has the 3D glasses on that could not have been gleaned by a 2D watching. To their credit, Mårlind and Stein do a fair job within the 3D framework of offering some nice depth perspective shots of caves where stalactites come down in the foreground or a lab entrance location that does visually appealing things with rainfall from an overhang contrasted against a set of steps. On the other hand, there is nothing so outstanding about this that it justifies paying an extra $3 for the ticket price.
Underworld: Awakening aggravates even further because in the city where I live (Vancouver), every single screening of the film in the city (in ten different theatres) offers no alternate to watching the film in 3D. In other words, what it feels like is a film where the studio is determined to gouge as much as possible from an audience by refusing cheaper 2D screenings. Given that Underworld: Awakening was not advance screened for critics, it was not possible to find any screening within reasonable distance of city limits – unless one wants to travel an hour outside of the city and add gas costs – that comes in at less than $15 for a single adult. This is simply greed. My response is that while this site does try to maintain a policy of supporting paying copyright owners fair due for their content, I have no compunctions about recommending that unless you have a burning desire to watch Underworld: Awakening in 3D then you should download a pirated copy – go to the following link at Z Movie. To ask $14-16 to watch a film without offering cheaper options to paying audiences is peddling inferior product at overhiked rates – and if distributors are going to continue to do this then this site will provide download links with the intention of extending the middle finger to them over the fact that they are taking excessive money from us and offering poorly produced goods in return.
Copyright Richard Scheib 1999-2011
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