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 2009 Patrick Tatopoulos film Underworld Rise of the Lycans. Today, he looks at the 2012 Måns Mårlind and Björn Stein film, Underworld Awakening. This article will contain spoilers.
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly why I liked Underworld Awakening as much as I did. It’s certainly not because it’s a continuation of any grand vision; as you can see above, this thing had two directors, and any recounting of the making of the film informs that production was hell. Part of it is that last week I watched the worst entry in this franchise, a movie that gets worse the more I think about it and, while Rise of the Lycans doesn’t challenge BloodRayne (2005) for the honor of the worst film reviewed in this series of essays, has firmly sunk down to the bottom five or so. Part of it is that Scott Speedman has been replaced as male lead in this film by the appreciably more handsome and almost infinitely more charming Theo James. Part of it is that there’s gore everywhere in this film; Selene is murdering the hell out of private security wolfmen and their human servants with no mercy or compunction or cuts away from guys’ heads exploding. And part of it is that they took a look around the movie landscape of the early 2010s, saw how successful superhero movies were getting, and turned this franchise’s premise into basically the X-Men, regardless of how little actual sense that makes.
This doesn’t make Underworld Awakening a good movie, I want to be clear on that — it’s not. The plotting is not particularly tight, it essentially has four sets and only two of them have any real prominence (the sprawling office compound of Stephen Rea’s evil Lycan master race eugenicist Nazi-types and Charles Dance’s vampire coven out in the woods), and the most famous and possibly notorious thing about the film is the one that I actually appreciated the most, which is that Scott Speedman bailed on this whole enterprise after almost 10 years and his plot-critical character, Michael, has to be written around the whole film while they figure out if they want to kill the character or just recast him or what. That’s fine by me! Michael sucks and his whole deal sucks! The only good thing about him is he spends a lot of time looking like Jacked Nightcrawler and if you’re not doing that, buddy, you’re not bringing anything to this table. Awakening introduces, for the first time, a human character who broadly speaking matters in the form of Michael Ealy’s Detective Sebastian, your stock “one good cop who knows the whole system is corrupt” placeholder. He’s fine. Some of his scenes obviously got cut for time to bring this thing down to a sleek 86 minutes; no real objections there, but a subplot with a rookie officer who was obviously going to turn out to be a Nazi Lycan plant gets forgotten about a third of the way into the film and he gets reformulated into a clumsy plot cudgel to get Selene from the coven attack back into the lab complex for the finale.
The movie’s plot is a very standard, brief there-and-back-again formulation dressed up in massive changes to the world and lore of Underworld, and we have to talk about those before we can talk about what actually transpires in the film. Selene’s opening narration informs us that off-camera between the end of the second movie and the beginning of the third, humanity discovered that vampires and werewolves were real and began treating them as a massive public health risk. This is a euphemistic way of saying the humans decided to kill ‘em all. The imagery here is of barbarous totalitarianism and industrial genocide as tac’d up stormtroopers massacre vampire and lycan women and children in their homes, drag vampire kids out into the sunlight to burn to death (on screen, which I thought was daring), put survivors into camps for study and annihilation, and so on. The dice are being extremely heavily loaded here in such histrionic fashion to position the vampires and lycans as sympathetic because they absolutely have to be for this to work; given what we know about the Underworld universe up to now, sympathy for these two groups would be ridiculous.
The world of the first two films is a world ruled by vampires and lycans for almost a full millennium as a violent, dystopic hell where the monstrous overclass casually eats and murders humanity as it pleases. Both sides see them as little more than cattle. The prequel third film, Rise of the Lycans, emphasizes a shift as it introduces the notion of vampire children who age into adults and the idea that werewolves and vampires can have children together — that these are no longer monsters, but people with a set of superpowers that make them cool. Awakening fully completes that turn, and by the time we rejoin Selene in the present, vampires and werewolves have been completely refigured into just being special, “different” kinds of people who society hates for having cool powers and abilities that make normies fear them — in short, they’re goth-coded mutants from Marvel Comics’s X-Men, which at the time was having a very successful run of franchise films. And like Marvel’s mutants, Underworld’s vampires and werewolves now implicitly stand in for protected classes that have faced racial and sex/gender discrimination and persecution in Western society. This has always been a complicated and problematic pop culture allegory over many generations of writers across many mediums, and in the context of Underworld’s specific vampires and werewolves, it’s downright farcical. Nevertheless, it’s what the franchise is doing now that superheroes are in, so get onboard. Fine.
It’s also immediately complicated and inverted by the actual story told in the movie, which I can’t tell if I like or not. The plot: We open with Selene fleeing the city in the midst of the state’s genocidal vampire purges, killing a bunch of soldiers and heading to the docks to meet Michael, who is played by a man who very obviously is not Scott Speedman and is mostly shot from behind or from a distance when possible. They get flash frozen with a cryogrenade. When Selene wakes up, she’s in an extremely 2010s Evil Corporate Science Lab (it is not hard to see why they contemplated a crossover with the Resident Evil movie franchise at points; they both really love their sterile evil corporate lab setups, among other aesthetic similarities). She is Subject 1; something called Subject 2, with which she shares a psychic connection, is escaping. She assumes Subject 2 is Michael and makes her own escape, following that psychic connection to track Subject 2 down. Meanwhile, evil administrator Dr. Jacob Lane (Stephen Rea) is giving a lot of eliminationist monologues and diatribes about ridding the world of vampires and werewolves. It turns out Subject 2 is actually her lab-born daughter with Michael, which Lane and his Nazi scientists created in a test tube. We’re calling her “Eve” because of course we are. The vampire resistance fighter David (Theo James! Hell yes! Watch The Gentlemen! The streaming show, not the bad movie it was based on!) intercedes and takes mother and daughter back to the vampire coven to exposit and figure character relationships out.
They’re at the vampire coven, ruled by vampire patriarch Thomas (Charles Dance), for a few hours before the evil corpo kill teams show up as predicted by the cowardly vampire lord, beat ass, and drag Eve back to the lab. What is strange about this is that the kill team guys are all lycans, not human footsoldiers in body armor. The vampires get massacred because they’re both very bad at this and were expecting humans and not werewolves, so they don’t have their silver loaded. They weren’t being foolish; lycans are supposedly extinct. They’re certainly not supposed to have a boss lycan the size of a Superduty that’s highly resistant to silver. What’s going on here? Well, after restarting David’s heart (a power that Selene just has due to being a hybrid), she heads out to look into some stuff.
We find out what’s going on here very quickly: Dr. Lane and the Nazi scientist eliminationists behind the brutal purges of vampires and werewolves are, in fact, werewolves themselves. They’re doing what every antagonist in this franchise is always trying to do, which is create the Perfect Evil Master Race Hybrid of vampire and werewolf. The big boss lycan who kicked Selene’s ass is Lane’s son, Quint, and he intends to vivisect Selene’s daughter to help make him immortal and impervious to harm. Detective Sebastian and Selene link up and decide to storm the building. Thus ensues essentially a 20 minute long action sequence of Selene killing everyone in the building with occasional assists by Sebastian, a recovered David, and a freed Eve. We get a lot of blood; we get a lot of headshots; we get Eve tearing Dr. Lane apart and leaving him to bleed out while hitting him with an ironically-reframed line he sneered at her earlier; if the entire franchise was up to the standard of the end of Underworld Awakening, there would be a much different tone to this series of reviews. Sure the CGI is still the CGI, but now we’re watching PS4 graphics instead of PS3 and there’s something to be said for that too.
Anyway it turns out Michael was still in the lab the whole time; he gets free in the chaos and the movie ends with the Search for Michael resuming. I have my guesses for how it’ll end up, but that’s for the next and thankfully last film in the series, Blood Wars (good lord) to figure out. As for Awakening, you shouldn’t go out of your way to see it, but if you have to watch one of the movies from the franchise cold, make it this one. Evolution has a much more enjoyable antagonist in Marcus, but you don’t need any investment for the paper-thin plot in this one to make sense, and while the action isn’t perfect even for its time — there’s still far too much teleportation jump cutting to show Selene’s superspeed, and the giant werewolf baddy can look goofy, especially in his transformation sequences — the guys you want to see get satisfyingly dead do in fact get satisfyingly dead, and on a fairly brisk schedule. For a bad action movie, that’s the best you can ask for.
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