Warning: This blog entry is rife with movie spoilers.

I watched the movie Underworld over the weekend. Somehow I missed it while it was in the theaters, and now, of course, there is a sequel. Ordinarily, I wouldn't hesitate to plunk down money for a vampire film, but in this case there's source material to be absorbed and understood first. What if my negligence caused me to miss out on something critical in the film? Besides, there's something fundamentally blasphemous about watching a sequel before the original. It's disruptive to the natural order of things. As you will be aware, the movie industry pays close attention to market trends, so if sequels start outgrossing originals, then maybe we'll come to a time when a sequel is released to the theater before the original. This conundrum almost occurred with the spectacular success of Terminator 2, but was laid to rest again with the spectacular failures of both Matrix sequels. So anyway, this is why I decided to watch the original of Underworld before venturing to the theater and creating a rift in the space-time continuum. Because I care about the world, and because I don't want the natural flow of time getting all wonky and repeating itself. One Hitler was enough.

But enough about how benevolent I am. Here's the plot of the film.

Selene the Vampire is having a tough time. She lives in the Goth Barbie Dream House, but she spends many of her nights brooding, staring at somebody's tomb, and dodging the unwanted attentions of Kraven, the interim leader of the vampire mansion. (Gee, with the name Kraven, do you think it's possible that he'll display cowardly and self-serving behavior throughout the course of the film?) As for the unwanted attentions, Selene is a warrior and Kraven is a bureaucrat, so anyone could see that they're not very compatible. But the pesky Kraven just won't take no for an answer, pestering Selene with dinner invitations and generally making her immortal life miserable. You know how alpha-vampires can be. (With his shoulder-length black hair and pale complexion, Kraven badly wants to be Eric Draven. But he's just not that cool.)

Anyway, Selene has reason to suspect Kraven is in league with the werewolf leader, Lucian. This is bad, because the werewolves have been at war with the vampires for hundreds of years and any sort of secret pact between the races would be considered treason. Why are they at war? Well, Selene tells us that no one knows because "digging into the past is forbidden." Verboten! At any rate, Selene doesn't know what to do about Kraven, so she "awakens" Viktor, the previous vampire patriarch, who has been hibernating under an ornate manhole cover for a while. Viktor greets Selene affectionately and asks about how her life is going. But all at once he gets really cranky about being awakened ahead of schedule (it seems another patriarch was scheduled to be awakened before him), and he tells Selene that unless she can prove her allegations against Kraven, she'll be severely punished. "You will not be shown an ounce of lenience!" he hisses, implying that such a crime will carry a violent punishment. He's careful to point out, however, that he thinks of her as a daughter and would hate to see her hurt. Hold up there, Mr. Crazy Pants. Seems that someone has developed a multiple personality disorder while hibernating. I guess by this we're meant to understand that Viktor is a ruthless leader of the purest sort who will do whatever it takes to protect the species. Selene is annoyed by his threats, but she tells him it's cool. She'll find some damn proof.

You know, when I started watching this film, it occurred to be that the conflict between these immortal species boiled down to a battle between goths and metalheads. This is Bauhaus vs. Metallica all the way. The vampires sashay around looking pouty and decadent while the werewolves strip down naked and have street fights. See, the werewolves are tough. They're tenacious. But they also live in sewers, which led me to another funny thought. Namely, what if this turned out to be sort of a classist parable, in which the scrappy werewolf proletariat tried to wrest power from the vampire bourgeoisie? Well, oddly enough, this turned out to be pretty close to the truth. See, back when the war began, the werewolves were slaves of the vampires. The war started when Viktor, who was the reigning patriarch at the time, became incensed about his daughter's relationship with Lucian, one of the werewolf slaves. The thought of the "abomination" in her belly caused him to recoil in Lovecraftian horror, and he killed his own daughter in order to prevent the baby from being born. Lucian was seriously peeved about this, and the werewolves rose up and revolted. Bingo: instant war. Now in a microwaveable container.

But back to the story. In the course of her field research, Selene has run into a human surgeon guy named Michael. She notes that the werewolves are pursuing him and takes him hostage to figure out why he is so important to the enemy. At some point she is shot, and during the ensuing car ride she has a spirited discussion with her hostage about whether or not she should go to a hospital. She's like, dude, don't bug me. I'm the one with the gun. He's like, yeah, ok, but what about when you crash the car? You've lost a lot of blood. Then she's like, shyeah, whatever, that's not gonna happen, and promptly loses consciousness. The car flies off the bridge and Michael has to save his pretty vampire kidnapper from bleeding to death and/or drowning. It's one of those charming "how-we-met" stories that they'll bore other couples with for years to come. "You'll never guess how Selene and I met! Well, you see, she was holding a gun to my head...."

So they get away, and before long they discover that not only has Michael been bitten by one of the werewolves, he also has a special kind of blood that the werewolves want to get their hands on. Apparently, something about this guy's lineage means he could absorb both vampire and werewolf blood to become a new kind of species. A vampwolf! Or...I don't know...maybe a werepire. The important thing is that, according to some ancient legend, the resulting hybrid would enable the werewolves to conquer the vampires once and for all. Nasty stuff, indeed!

This is where the plot gets a little unfocused (or maybe I just wasn't able to focus on it). The revelations about the war's origins painted the werewolves as sympathetic figures, and it seemed to me that we were heading for some kind of revolution. But then it turned into a drama about whether Selene could protect Michael from both sides, and whether they could escape together to indulge in their forbidden love. Verboten! So the star-crossed lovers are on the run, with both the vampires and werewolves in hot pursuit. That is, after Selene has changed into appropriate battle attire. What's this? We're going to war? Hold on a sec while I shimmy into a leather catsuit. Ok, cool. Now we can go.

Toward the end, there's a not-quite-epic face-off between Viktor and Michael, who has transitioned from vapid human surgeon to vapid werewolf/vampire hybrid. See, Michael was dying, and Selene was forced to bite him so he'd have the strength to recover or something. Now he has lots of body hair, and something has gone horribly wrong with his rib cage. (Did I mention that the weird make-up makes him resemble someone from the cast of CATS?) Now that he's a super-hybrid he's supposed to be super-strong, but for some reason he's still getting his hindquarters handed to him by Viktor. Selene sighs to herself (why trust a human to do a vampire's job?), and intervenes on his behalf. She executes a comically exaggerated leap through the air over Viktor's head, then holds up her sword, which is dripping with his blood. And then, as you're trying to figure out whether she stabbed him or what, something very bad happens to him. I mean bad. As bad as that opening scene in Ghost Ship. Even the similar scene in Kill Bill was less disturbing, and that's saying a lot. But whatever. I'm sure the teenaged boys in the audience thought it was cool.

Overall, the film was entertaining, and it was as at least visually interesting, especially with regard to Selene's wardrobe (again, I'm sure the teenaged boys will agree). But plot and character? Um, yeah. Not so much. Selene doesn't have much of a personality, which on its own is forgivable because this is sort of the tradition for heroes of this genre. If you remember, Blade wasn't exactly loquacious, but he got away with it because other people in the film DID have entertaining personalities. Whistler anyone? In Underworld however, the love interest has nothing much going for him, either, except for his hippie hair and generic, cover-of-a-romance-novel looks. I'm sorry, SOMEONE needs to have a personality for this schtick to fly. I found myself enjoying the evil vampire overlord more and more, simply because he was doing and saying interesting things. The problem is, this particular narrative is supposed to be a supernatural Romeo & Juliet, in which we are meant to sympathize with the misunderstood lovers and root for them to get together. But it's kind of hard to do that when they go all Natural Born Killers on us, and destroy every living thing in the tri-state area with all the emotional involvement of a box of rocks. I mean, what if Lancelot and Guinevere had fire-bombed Camelot? What if Jack and Rose had found some tommy guns on the lower deck of the Titanic and pumped the other passengers full of lead before that iceberg ever slid into view? It'd be funny, sure, but would you still care about their happiness? I'm guessing not.