Movie Review: Underworld Awakening

I don’t know if I’ve said it before or not, but I really hate 3D. Unfortunately, due to poor planning on my part, my friend and I were unable to watch the 2D showing for Underworld Awakening, and instead had to suffer through those detestable glasses. This is what happens when you procrastinate everything in your life, including driving to the theater; you miss the showing you actually wanted to go to. I probably wouldn’t be against 3D so much if it weren’t for already needing glasses to see the screen, and if it didn’t cause a headache.

But that’s okay, because some asshole I ran into online the other day told me that a simple procedure will solve that problem. In order to enjoy the movies, all I need is ocular surgery!

Spoilers ahead for Underworld Awakening.

For the most part, with the exception of a few scenes, Underworld Awakening might as well have been two-dimensional. It would certainly explain the not-migraine I got, and maybe my aggravation was mostly caused by the jackass who took his three-year-old daughter to the theater and let her have a tantrum in the middle of the movie. But that’s a rant I shouldn’t get into here.

So the movie starts with humans discovering vampires and lycanthropes. Okay, how did they do that? What tipped them off? And one would think that humans would be the main antagonists in this movie, but that doesn’t happen. It starts with Selene breaking out of a facility where humans were supposedly experimenting on her, but then it turns out that they’re werewolves who are just working the system. So… in actuality, outside the first five minutes, humans really have nothing to do with the movie. And this leads me into another problem. All the people Selene kills upon escaping are human, but when she breaks back in at the end of the movie, she only encounters werewolves. That’s some luck on her part, that not a single werewolf in a facility crawling with werewolves attacked her on her way out.

I also really enjoyed how no human—when we actually see a human—believes that werewolves are still alive, even though there’s a chase scene with them that had to have had hundreds of eye witnesses and ended with three dead lycanthropes in the middle of a crowded street. Yeah, I totally see how no one noticed that. I guess the government doesn’t care to start another purge without some more substantial evidence. I mean, at the beginning of the movie, they determined the existence of vampires and werewolves and decided to kill them all because… I have no idea. It would be nice to know though.

For the most part, I liked Selene’s daughter, Eve, and that she wasn’t entirely useless. And Selene waking up to her and not Michael and dealing with a daughter during her loss was certainly interesting. After watching her brutally murder people, it was nice to see some emotion from her. Their psychic link, however, I do not get. It’s like the new dues-ex-machina of the franchise.

Sebastian, our token black guy who—gasp!—doesn’t die, seemed pretty cool, and I liked that he didn’t agree with the extermination of vampires and lycanthropes, due to having to watch his vampire wife burn in the sun. He was also a little badass.

I kind of feel as though the movie should have developed things a little better, much like the mass extermination by humans, the relationship between the nurse and daughter, and the one vampire guy who tried helping Selene out. So many things were built up, but the payoff didn’t really happen. If the main fight was going to be entirely between vampires and werewolves again, there was no reason to involve humans. Selene wakes up to an awful world where her kind is nearly extinct and random clothing stores sell real vampire teeth, and then the movie kind of drops the subject and moves on.

Overall, it was still watchable. I enjoyed it, but it definitely wasn’t worth paying the 3D ticket price for the occasional shattered windshield to shoot broken glass at my face. It would be really awesome if movies in 3D would stop having scenes specifically for the 3D visual and just tell the damn story.