Movie Review: Underworld: Awakening

A little while back, I watched this film with my family after a recommendation from a friend.

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

This fourth installment of the popular vampire/ werewolf series "Underworld" starts off after the events of the second movie: "Underworld: Evolution." Humans have now discovered the existence of vampires and lycans and have begun waging an exterminating war against them. Selene wakes up twelve years later, having been cryogenically frozen, and escapes from the medical corporation Antigen that holds her. She makes contact with a young girl named Eve and, with the help of a vampire called David and a human detective called Sebastian, must rescue Eve from Antigen and uncover the sinister motives of Dr. Lane.

I was not overly optimistic about seeing the movie, given my feelings towards the third film and that the trailers did not look interesting to me. Unfortunately, the movie was indeed nothing special or worth remembering. Compared to the other three movies in the series, this one had a completely different feel to it. As my dad pointed out to me in a conversation after we watched the movie, there is no mythology or history attached to this movie; instead, you have more science and less of the mythology. The whole back stories with early vampires and early lycans have been told, leaving an uninteresting story that doesn't fit with the series.

A major problem with the movie was the entire plot. The whole idea of lycans trying to become immune to silver and growing to ginormous proportions was rather dumb; one would think that humans are the major villains of the story, especially given the first five minutes of the film or so. The reasoning for Eve's importance, how her DNA is important for making the lycan serum, didn't make sense either. Eve's origins were also left unexplained: was Selene pregnant when she was captured (which doesn't make sense because she was frozen for twelve years and wouldn't have been able to give birth) or was the girl born out of a test tube? Either way, it was not explained and thus didn't make much sense in the movie. Some aspects of the plot also seemed repetitive; for example, Selene bringing Eve to the vampire coven reminded me of her bringing Michael Corvin to the manor in the first "Underworld" movie.

The characters in the movie were not overly interesting either. It didn't help that Selene was the only familiar character and that Michael had a brief minute of screen time in the entire film. The new characters were dull and nothing interesting; at least the characters in the first film, despite not having much personality and being predictable, were at least interesting to watch, especially Lucian.

In the end, I wasn't expecting much from "Underworld: Awakening," and I didn't get much. The first two movies were good popcorn entertainment, but this one was not. I hope they either stop making more movies to milk the cash cow or that they get some better writers in there.

I give it one out of five stars.