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| Underworld Awakening (2012) () |
IMDB Rating: 7.2
Released: Jan 20, 2012
Rating: R
Genres:
Action, Fantasy, Horror,
Sub Genres:
Vampire, Werewolf,
Running Time: 88 minutes
AKA: Underworld: New Dawn
Country: USA
Language: English
IMDB Link: Underworld Awakening on IMDB
Official Site: Official Site
Views: 3,680
Plot: Six months after the events of Underworld: Evolution, vampire Selene is captured by humans during "The Purge," a massive crusade of war to exterminate vampires and lycans after mankind learns of their existence. Humans call them "Non-Humans" and "The infected."
Twelve years later, human governments had committed genocides to vampires and lycans, killing everything, surviving populations were reduced to being scavengers and guerrillas, and 90% of the vampire race was annihilated. Selene is freed from cryogenic suspension and escapes the medical corporation Antigen. The corporation is trying to make an antidote for the virus that creates vampires and lycans. Selene starts to have strange visions after her escape, which she follows, believing them to be linked to her lover, the vampire-lycan hybrid Michael Corvin. The visions lead her into a building where she runs into David, a fellow vampire.
While talking to David, Selene has another vision. Following the vision, she discovers not Michael, but a young girl called only "Subject 2," later revealed to be a hybrid and Selene and Michael's daughter. David, noting that Eve (Subject 2) has been injured by the lycans and is somehow not healing, takes them to his coven. David's father, Thomas, does not welcome Selene and Eve, stunning Selene with the news that Michael died twelve years ago and that Selene was the cause for the destruction of the vampire race. Upon being given some vampire blood, Eve heals extremely quickly.
Dr. Jacob Lane, director of Antigen, is revealed to be a lycan alongside his son, Quint. The "antidote" the corporation has been working on for many years is actually to make lycans immune to the deadly effects of silver and to enhance their physical abilities. Eve's hybrid genetic code is required to achieve this, so Lane sends Quint with other lycans to the vampire coven to recapture her.
Meanwhile, expecting a human attacks at any moment, David tries to rally the vampires resistances to fight back, while his father orders everyone to evacuate and hide. Most of the vampires stay, and arm themselves heavily. Unexpectedly, lycans arrived in large numbers instead, and numerous vampires are slaughtered, a huge blow to the coven. Selene encounters a gigantic "super lycan", who is later revealed to be Quint, his body changed by injections using Eve's blood. Selene is knocked unconscious under a pile of rubble, Eve is turned over to the lycans by Thomas in exchange for their departure, and David is mortally wounded during the battle. Selene decides to save Eve but first revives David using her immortal blood, given to her by Alexander Corvinus in Evolution.
Able to survive in sunlight, Selene enlists the help of Detective Sebastian, a human who tried to investigate Antigen earlier in the film. Sebastian agrees to help save Eve, admitting he was married to a nurse who was bitten at work and became a vampire, until she was killed by authorities during the Purge; they forced her to out into the day, into direct daylight, and she was burned to death.
Selene destroys part of Antigen's headquarters using explosives and silver gas, forcing Dr. Lane to move Subject 2 out of the building to perform an operation to create more of the antidote. Selene escapes from the lycans in the building. (Antigen is nearly entirely staffed by lycans) In the process, she finds Michael cryogenically frozen in a laboratory. She shoots his cell to let him thaw. Escaping in a van, Dr. Lane is intercepted by Sebastian and then by Selene, who causes the van to crash. Quint arrives, transforms into his super lycan form, and fights Selene.
Eve awakens on her stretcher, frees herself from the van, and engages Dr. Lane in a fight, who has injected himself with the super lycan formula used on Quint. Sebastian and the revived David aid Subject 2 in her fight until she kills Dr. Lane by ripping his throat out.
Meanwhile, Quint corners Selene in a small cement guardroom but is forced to revert to his human form to get to her, only for Selene to shove an activated silver-based grenade into Quint's body. He heals instantly, trapping the grenade inside. Panicking, he half-changes back to lycan form, but it is too late, and he explodes.
Selene goes to find Michael but finds an empty cryogenic cell with Eve sharing his vision and learns he is on the roof. Selene, Eve, and David run to the roof only to find Michael has gone. Selene narrates, concluding that she will find Michael and take back the world from the humans and lycans, so the vampires can rebuild themselves as the humans declared war.
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| Underworld Awakening Movie Review |
Source: MaryAnn Johanson
Article: Come On Now
The fanboy-wank-material franchise continues! Kate Beckinsale runs around a dank, rainy, gothy, first-person-shooter generic urban landscape -- in slo-mo! -- in skintight leather! or some sort of pleatheresque rubber at least! -- killing werewolves and never ever combing her hair! Cuz that’s sexy, if you’re a 14-year-old boy. And the blood and brainmatter splatters out at you in 3D! Please to have a cinemagasm!
*grrr*
Behold The Cleansing -- also known as The Purge -- when humanity finally discovers the existence of vampires and lycans and engages in some martial law and some flamethrowing in order to wipe out the monsters. Is this fascist fantasy meets fantasy horror of any narrative consequence? None whatsoever. The Biggest Thing Ever for planet Earth and human civilization is dispatched in mere minutes at the opening of Underworld: Awakening, though not before Beckinsale’s (Whiteout, Nothing But the Truth) badass lady vampire warrior Selene lets us know she’s going to “escape” with her hybrid vamp/wolf lover Michael. To where? I dunno: the Moon, perhaps? Who knows? Why, it’s almost as if the writers -- there’s a remarkable number of them for so content-free a story -- knew that Selene and Michael would be captured, before they could “escape,” by humans who want to experiment on them and stuff for lulz and whatevs.
So now it’s 12 years later, and Selene wakes up from cryofreeze to discover that her pleather corset and her rubber bodysuit and her The Matrix boots have been carefully perserved behind glass -- right in the cryolab! -- for just this very moment. Lest the fanboys have any worry that Selene might possibly be rendered an actual person, if an undead one, in this fourth installment, rather than reverting to her wanktastic role as a fetish object, never fear. She continues to serve no purpose whatsoever beyond pandering to adolescent male horniness, as she pulls on a leather overcoat in slo-mo.
That’s why we’re meant to be cheering for the vampires here, and not the humans. This mystified me for a bit, during the Cleansing bits, what with all the human soldiers Selene dispatches without a thought, they faceless behind riot helmets in case we might accidentally sympathize with our own species instead of the one that preys upon us. Selene is not a vampire: she’s an embodiment of male teenaged sexual terror, a woman who will rip your, ahem, head off as soon as look at you. Also, although it’s clear that vampires can be killed, Selene is somehow special, almost invincible -- she survives things that we see kill other vampires. She’s not just dangerous, she’s unstoppable. Oh, yeah, baby.
Ugh.
This is exciting, apparently. It looks pretty stupid to me, and it isn’t helped by her utter lack of personality, or the fact that her face has been CGI’ed into plastic smoothness. She’s a living doll intended to simultaneously turn the viewer on and make the viewer shit himself in terror. (Me? I just gotta laugh at the obviousness and tedious predictability of her existence. And also at the fact that no one ever went broke pandering to adolescent male horniness.) Conversely, I wonder if the reason she sorta looks like a character in a videogame is to impart the viewer with a sense that, for all her strength and all the panic she is meant to inspire, she could also be easily controlled?
Selene’s meta purpose renders mute all complaints that the story is nonexistent, that it occurs in a preposterous bubble world that is cheap and small and bears little resemblance to reality. How can human society be so absent from the still-ongoing vampire war with the lycans? (The “big” plot point here? The inter-undead tensions are exacerbated by the presence of a young hybrid child [India Eisley], also escaped from the cryolab at the same time as Selene. Naturally, the girl is Selene and Michael’s mad-science-begotten child.) How can it be that vampires don’t turn into lycans, or hybrids, when bitten? How can Selene be out of silver bullets in the middle of the climactic battle, and then have reloaded in the next bit, when there’s nowhere on her skintight-rubber-clad body she could have possibly have been carrying some spares? How can it all be so silly with its humorless solemnity?
It’s all my fault, really, that I’m even noticing these things as problems in the first place. If only I could learn to see movies as they were meant to be seen -- through male eyes -- I’d have a much better time with it. Stupid girl.
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