Underworld
| State of body | Drained of blood. |
|---|---|
| Detail of inspection | Inspected twice. |
| Forensic Investigator | shellshear |
| Comments | Subject was very old, and quite cold when discovered. Didn’t appear to have any family or loved ones. |
It would be easy to be disappointed by “Underworld”. If you are unaware of the White Wolf role-playing games “Vampire: The Masquerade” and “Werewolf: The Apocalypse” and were going into the film expecting a Hammer Horror Werewolf vs. Vampire movie, you’d be rather perplexed. The film notoriously owes a great deal to these games (to the point that White Wolf sued, I believe). And although I have played and enjoyed the Vampire game, familiarity with the conventions just made me more frustrated with the unoriginal elements of the film. I came out of “Underworld” frustrated, and madly plotting my own “Vampires vs. Werewolves” film, the details of which I will mercifully spare you, as they bear so little resemblance to Underworld they would scarcely count as a critique of the film.
Most of Underworld’s ills come not from its game origins, but from its adherence to conventions rapidly being established in the wake of “The Matrix”: fast, confusing editing; stylish leather outfits and sunglasses; set designers obsessed with a look of elegant decay; and compulsory kung-fu and gunfights. The plot is actually quite decent, once we accept that it’s not actually a film about vampires and werewolves, but about immortal European Goths and their politics.
Kate Beckinsale’s Selene character could be an interesting protagonist. She is a beautiful, single-minded vampire assassin, with a sense of revenge so powerful it has driven her for hundreds of years to kill werewolves. As we eventually discover, her black and white viewpoint is flawed: her vampiric parent (or, as they call it, “sire”) was responsible for the death of her family, not the werewolves. However, the film doesn’t restrict itself to showing events from her perspective. It takes an omniscient viewpoint, showing some scenes with only the werewolves (no, I’m not going to call them Lycans), some with Scott Speedman’s Michael (the human who gets turned into a werewolf), and some with the other vampires. This can be a perfectly good narrative device, but in this case, it seems to lack focus: one minute Selene’s is the protagonist, the next, we’ve changed to Michael. Many of the “God’s eye” scenes are unnecessary, and distance us from Selene.
I would have preferred the film to follow her more closely, and filter events through her perception. Initially, we should believe her that the werewolves are a blight and ought to be destroyed (and we should have been told at this point that most humans don’t survive being bitten by immortals – otherwise attempting to destroy them seems rather futile). As the film progresses, we should begin to doubt as she does. Instead, the many scenes from the point of view of the werewolves tend to dilute the “bad werewolves” view. While they have a couple of torture victims strung up, you don’t imagine the vampires would behave any differently in the same position. And the audience becomes sympathetic to the werewolves long before Selene does.
One of my main problems with the film is that the vampires and werewolves are not particularly different. In the first scenes, we see a fight between the vampires and the werewolves. In their human forms, both sides look similar: European fashion models with Matrix clothing and wielding big guns. The half-werewolf state is almost indistinguishable from the big-teeth-vampire state. Neither side seems able to shoot straight, which is surprising considering how much time they must have had to practice. Neither side seems to exhibit particularly were-wolfish or vampiresque techniques. They could have characterized the sides with different fighting techniques. The werewolves already prefer big automatic weapons, and stand in the open spraying everyone and everything with bullets. They regenerate faster than the vampires (something not established until later in the film – this early fight scene could have been a good time to establish a few more of the “ground rules”, such as the fact that the werewolves can push the bullets out of their bodies), so they don’t care about being hit. The vampires, on the other hand, should be weaker than the werewolves, and more vulnerable, but faster: if a werewolf were to catch Selene, it could crush her with its bare hands.
We also know that the vampires have been hunting the werewolves for some time. A faction of vampires might pride themselves on killing a werewolf with as few bullets as possible. As such, they could even have single-shot revolvers - dueling pistols, say. As experts in the hunt, they might be skilled in coordinating with each other, separating the werewolves from each other, herding them into poor positions, and efficiently killing them. This could have been shown in the early part of the fight, before the werewolves pulled out their ultraviolet guns and killed one of the hunters.
After the first battle, Selene comments to Kraven, the acting head of their clan, that the werewolves opened fire in public, something they hadn’t done before. It might have been more interesting for them not to have the fight in public right from the word “go” – if the werewolves could count on the vampires not fighting in the open, they could have waited until the vampires were a great deal closer before opening fire and breaking this truce. If it was in both the vampires and the werewolves interest for regular humans not to know about them, the initial fight could have been much more interesting. Nobody willing to make the first move while the humans are looking, but as soon as someone cuts the power…
Kraven is in love with Selene, but she regards him with open contempt, despite his power. As the film goes on, we discover that he is a coward, a traitor, an ineffectual bureaucrat, an egocentric power maniac, and is rather stupid. Selene does pretty much as she pleases - bringing Michael into the house, waking Viktor, avoiding her social obligations. It might be more interesting if Kraven was superficially effective and powerful – if Selene was genuinely afraid of him, but driven to do these actions by her sense of duty, it would add more tension to these scenes. She could even be attracted to him at first – he had a big reputation, after all, of being the one who killed Lucien. As it is, the audience knows perfectly well that this wimp couldn’t have killed the werewolf. We’re already way ahead of our protagonist.
So, Kraven is powerful and threatening, and Selene resists him mainly out of her love for her sire, Viktor. This does serve to initially weaken her character, but as it is, she is a bit of a one-note character– or at least, a major fifth - barely changing in the course of the film. She needs a more dramatic journey.
Which brings us to the love story. It is, unfortunately, weak. Selene and Michael barely spend any time together, exchange one barely motivated kiss half-way through, but are supposed to deeply care for each other. Their story needs much more time to develop and get us to care for them. And there’s no particular reason we couldn’t get that time, if we weren’t cutting back and forth so much. Our main characters should be finding out the plot points revealed in the many asides – they certainly have the motivation. The more Selene finds out, the more she needs Michael alive – and she is forced to defy Kraven and eventually, Viktor as well, in her pursuit of the truth. Her initial attempts to find out the truth should be motivated by her love for Viktor – she delves into Michael’s past, reads ancient documents, eavesdrops on werewolves (discovering that there is a vampire traitor, but not who), and questions Michael repeatedly (instead of the perfunctory “why are they after you?”). Plenty of together time. And he would question her, in turn, finding out her history, questioning her love for Viktor, which by now is more habit and loyalty. By the time we get to the finale, they should be in love, if not lovers, and their concerns turned to the impossibility of their relationship.
In the finale, then, the werewolves might capture Selene and Michael, and only then would we find that the head werewolf is Lucien, and that the werewolves aren’t the villains. Only then would we find out that Kraven is the traitor – and that he’s playing all sides against each other, bringing the vampires into the werewolves’ lair and killing both vampires and werewolves who get in his way. The conclusion could be largely the same – the big fight between all the vampires and all the werewolves (yay!), except it would be nice to have the werewolves be more wolfish, and less people standing around with machine guns.
Ah, the big fight scene. Why would the werewolves not have enormous UV lamps lying around the place? Their fortifications were pretty feeble – it didn’t seem to occur to them that they might be attacked. I wanted to see more invention from both sides: the vampires having a great opportunity to show off their clever tactics; the werewolves attacking with a great deal more force (perhaps wielding giant metal shields with spikes, with which to crush the unprepared vampire). Viktor glorying in the destruction, killing his old nemesis Lucien himself. We can even conclude the film with the ending as shown: Selene biting Michael, turning him into the weird black-eyed thing, and them fighting Viktor together.
One last thing. The film finishes on a slightly odd note: Selene and Michael, having defeated Viktor and ended the war between werewolves and vampires (at least temporarily), look deeply into their eyes, briefly, then wander off without even touching each other. Perhaps the filmmakers were aware, and a little embarrassed, at how little chemistry they had generated between the two characters. If they had spent more of the film on the pair, perhaps they could, I don’t know, hold hands or something?