Underworld: Awakening

Last night, Evan and I went to see Underworld: Awakening. I always get the subtitles of these movies mixed up with Resident Evil (I know. “You can you mix those two up?” You say to yourself. “Resident Evil is action/horror from Screen Gems about zombies, and Underworld is action/horror from Screen Gems about vampires! They’re completely different!”) Maybe it’s that they all tend to have subtitles that are one word starting with a vowel. Apocalypse, Evolution, Extinction, Afterlife, Awakening. Rise of the Lycans and Retribution broke the trend, but I would not be surprised to see Resident Evil: Ovulation or Underworld: Ululate in 2014.

In the preview game, Evan got The Hunger Games right off the bat (in the future, people will apparently be fine with watching murder on TV. Everything set in the future agrees with this), so I had to lay the smack down. I got Cabin in the Woods, The Raven, Ghost Rider, and one more that I can’t remember. Evan complained. I gloated.

The movie starts with flashbacks to the previous three (possibly just the first two) movies, while Selene (Kate Beckinsale, still as good as ever) narrates what happened. Then we cut to a series of news-ish shots as humanity discovered the existence of vampires and werewolves (sorry, Lycans) and does what humanity does best – wages war. Then we cut to live action (and 3D!) as Selene has to escape the teams that humanity has sent out to hunt down the non-human species. She does this in a series of pretty awesome stunts, as well as jumping off a lot of really high things (it’s been established that she can survive pretty much any fall. Which is doubly impressive, because she does it in what I can only describe as high-heel combat boots.

She makes her way to the docks, where Michael (her boyfriend and hybrid vampire-lycan) waits. They plan on fleeing to whatever the remotest part of the world is. Unfortunately, the docks are being staked out, and they both end up getting knocked out and captured.

Selene awakens upside down, frozen in a block of ice in a lab, somewhere. She’s also getting visions from the viewpoint of whatever or whoever woke her up. She manages to break free of the ice, and stumbles over to her combat suit (conveniently stored in the lab, right beside her). She puts it on right as security starts gassing her room, and now she has to escape from that, too. Does she do it? Of course she does. In the coolest manner possible? Of course she does.

From there, the plot kicks off, introducing new characters and their relationship to Selene, Vampires, or just society in general. There’s an inexplicably helpful cop (actually, the reason may have just been unstated. Subtlety? Really?) and a few more vampires and lycans, and we see how that goes. There are guns that need strangely little reloading, a bladed (and curvy) tonfa, silver bullets, UV-bullets, silver nitrate gas, and grenades. There are wicked awesome stunts, and a car chase scene that made me flinch because I forgot I was wearing 3D glasses.

The movie is pretty awesome. It’s possible I’m overstating that because it exceeded my expectations. There is a lot of blood and gore, but it’s awesome! The music is fairly good. It punches up action scenes to make them more frenetic. And action scenes make up most of this movie. It doesn’t slow down a whole lot.

There are a few things bad with this movie. Sometimes the acting isn’t terribly good. But if you’re going to this for the acting, you’re doing movies wrong. There’s a young girl who gets all creepy, like the girl from The Ring gone terribly, terribly wrong (or right). Children in horror movies are all creepy. Horror should be reserved for adults (and scantily clad teens, but that’s a given).

All in all, I think I’d go as far as saying this is a theatre movie. It’s pretty much all action, and the stunts are wicked-awesome. This is the rare movie that actually better than its predecessors. Not that that’s too hard (given its pedigree), but it’s still a really cool action movie.