Underworld: Awakening

When I went to see this tonight, I made a vital mistake.  As I preached yesterday, I engaged my brain.  When watching an Underworld film, this is a bad idea.  For the first quarter of the film, I was waiting to see where it was all going.  For the second quarter, I grew bored.  In the third quarter, I shut my brain off and just cruised through the rest.  Once I disengaged active thought, Underworld: Awakening became an awesomely bad movie.  

The film picks up a bit after the second film ended.  Selene and Michael are still making a go of it, but now...humans know all about the humans and lycans.  The film deals with the after-effects of that discovery.  I won't go too far into the plot, as there isn't much and I don't want to spoil it for you.  Mark feels the Underworld movies don't need much plot and cited it as a positive when we were discussing the film.  He was right, as anytime in any of the movies that the vampires engage in vampire politics, the movies drag and suffer.  

What little plot there is doesn't always make sense.  Selene interacts with some characters which should have yielded a particular result later but does not.  You find yourself wondering what the point of some scenes was once the movie has ended.  The best way to handle that, if you want to enjoy the movie, is to just not think about it.  

The special effects haven't changed much since the first movie.  Practical effects don't look too bad, while the CGI often looks cartoony.  The character design of one of the new characters is just plain awful, while the CGI appearance of another one brings to mind some of the disasters from Ang Lee's Hulk film.  

There is absolutely no reason to see this movie in theaters.  If you are going to, I hope you get an empty theater, as the film can only be made better by a little bit of good-natured heckling, which you can't do with anyone else present.  See it with a friend who likes to make fun of movies.  (We missed you during this one, Rick.)  

On a side note, there has been some speculation that Kate Beckinsale is going to supplant Milla Jovovich as the woman known for leading a terrible sci-fi/fantasy series.  I don't see that happening yet, as Kate Beckinsale just doesn't have the charisma that Milla Jovovich has.  Besides, the Resident Evil films are more prominent in nerd culture.  What's interesting is that both series are distributed by the same studio.  Interesting, yes?  Mark wants to know when we get the cross-over movie.

(Moved from FB - January 21, 2012)