y original Underworld review grew and grew, and ultimately became the longest review I've ever written. This is odd, since the movie is not very good, and I wouldn't have thought I had very much to say about it. The reason I made so many comments, I think, was because it could have been a great film, or at least a pretty good one, and when it sucked it seemed like such a missed opportunity.

On top of that I got some reader feedback about Underworld in the days after my review, and I posted it with even more comments. You can see it after the review; just keep scrolling down.

The one thing I didn't include in the original review was a categorized rating score, since I hadn't thought to start doing them in my reviews yet. So here it is, post dated in from July 2004. I have not seen Underworld since I first saw it in the theaters, back in September 2003, since I don't have fond enough memories of it to part with $10 for the DVD.  Despite that, I still hope they do a second Underworld movie, since with a half-decent plot the first one could have been such a cool film.

Underworld
Script/Story: 5
Acting/Casting: 4
Action: 6
Comedy: NA
Eye Candy: 7
Fun Factor: 4
Replayability: 5
Overall: 4

If I had a score for "missed opportunities," Underworld would get a 10. If I had a score for "script that could have been great but wasn't" it would get a 10. If I had a score for "great concept that was ruined by poor execution" it would get a 10.

I think you see my point.

Underworld.

Malaya and I went to see it Friday, at the 1:55pm showing.  That was the first showing on opening day, but we weren't exactly ravenous to see it, we just had some interest and hadn't been to a movie for a few weeks. We figured it would be sorta dumb, but would have some good vampire vs. werewolf battle scenes, all ripped straight from The Matrix, stylistically.

And we pretty much got what we expected, though I was disappointed in the quality of the writing and direction, and a lot of the choices they made in how they set up the world and plot.  Malaya seemed less picky about/disappointed in the overall quality of it, but I don't think either of us exactly liked it.  It wasn't like I wanted to walk out, but it was just okay at best, and frequently "oh god that's stupid" at worst.  For me, anyway.  It feels worse in my memory as I think about it now, so this will probably be a more negative discussion than I would have launched into the minute I walked out of the theater.

There are some spoilers in this discussion, but not any major ones, and nothing about the actual plot twist ending, which is somewhat of a surprise.

As I said, it wasn't good, but it wasn't all that bad.  I did want a fast forward button a few times early on, when there were some long and deadly stretches of dialogue, and there were very few things I would have rewinded to watch again.  Probably the only one for sure was along speech by a character in which he tried to explain how vampires and werewolves got started, and why one character is so important due to his genetics.

My take on it was that one immortal guy had 2 sons, and one founded the vampire line, while the other the werewolves.  Malaya didn't think that was it at all, and thought that while it was the vampire origin in one son, the other was just human but a carrier for the genetic oddity that's so important in the movie's plot.  And that there was never any explanation given as to how werewolves came to be.  It was unclear in any event, and I'd watch that part again just to see if it made any more sense.  Other than that, once was plenty for Underworld.  I don't regret watching it, and I guess it was worth the $5.75 I paid for my matinee ticket, but part of that is because we had a coupon for a free hotdog and Slurpee, and that food that would cost about $2.50 at any K-Mart in the US was $7.50 at the movie.  Not that we would have gotten it if not for the coupon, but anyway...

Critics are mostly in agreement with me. They don't think it's Cold Creek Manor awful, but the current tally on Rotten Tomatoes is 29% positive, which I'd say is about right.  I didn't hate it, but I'd give it like a C-, which is below a recommend from me, and that's almost entirely since there was some interesting action and nice visuals and nice set design. How to define the mediocrity of Underworld?

• It wasn't a bad movie that was indifferent and sloppy.
• It wasn't a terrible movie that was the best it could be.
• It was a potentially very good movie that didn't come anywhere near living up to it's potential.

The disappointment I feel at the fact that this movie had the elements to be really good, but never lived up to any of them. I saw Blade a couple of weeks ago and while that was not very good, probably worse than Underworld, it did the best it could.  It was saddled with the inflexible Wesley Snipes, a female lead with no acting ability whatsoever, an utterly ridiculous climax, and never felt like more than a shiny B-movie, but it had more energy and better action and smarter special effects.  Underworld could have been borderline great, but due to poor writing and directing, it didn't come anywhere near its potential.

They had a lot of plot ideas, a lot of battle ideas, and a lot of potentially-interesting characters, but they just couldn't put it all together. There were a lot of scenes that did nothing, and a lot of great scenes that should have been in it didn't make it into the movie at all.  I also didn't really care for their  depiction of werewolves or vampires, in terms of how they tweaked the traditional mythology for the movie.

Underworld is really a story of lost opportunities, metaphorically speaking.

The world looked cool, but it had no variety; it was always dark tunnels and dripping water, and everyone in it wore black all the time.  Of course the Vampires did, but so did the Werewolves.  And since the vampires were really just humans with no special abilities other than being able to jump down a long way without being injured on impact, and the werewolves looked like normal humans until they went into werewolf form, most of the movie was made up of people in black shooting guns at other people in black in poorly-lit sets.

The plot of the movie had promise.  Not the whole werewolf/vampire aspect so much, but the human betrayal and trust and deception stuff.  There are double crosses galore, relationships built on centuries of lies, traitors to the cause, and the ever-present movie thing, where forbidden love conquers all obstacles. There was also a huge backstory to the plot, with centuries of deceits and events that created the situation we saw today, and some of those are hinted at, but it's never really developed, other than one flashback sequence.

As for the missed opportunities, I spent much of the movie thinking about how it could have been better.  The direction was very mediocre, and the world was very unrealistic. After an opening battle scene that begins in a subway station but quickly descends into the depths of the sewers, there is virtually never another scene in the entire movie that involves any non-combatants. It's all vampires and werewolves, battling it out with no humans having any clue about them at any time, and never even any innocent bystanders or nosy cops. All too convenient, really; the mark of lazy film makers.

Things that you'd expect and desire in a vampire/werewolf movie that never showed up:

• There were zero scenes of werewolves stalking humans for prey, or being terrorizing.
• There were zero scenes of vampires stalking or seducing or anything; they just hung out in a big mansion, or went out to hunt/kill werewolves.
• There was one shot of the full moon ever, and it lasted about 5 seconds.
• There was one shot of a vampire enjoying the taste of blood, and it was not a good traditional stalking type of thing.
• There was never any shot of a cross in the entire movie, either used against the vampires or tried to be used and failed since it didn't really work against them.
• It was always night, apparently, since there's never a shot of a vampire getting into a coffin, or worrying about the dawn, or waiting for sunset. And never any hint of the werewolves taking advantage of the old daylight weakness to make an attack.

Basically all of the good horror elements of the very rich vampire and werewolf mythos were entirely discarded.  Neither type of creature was ever cool, other than having some cool weaponry and clothing, and the nice gothic architecture of the vampires. In fact I couldn't see any real reason to want to be either type of them; they had immortality (even the werewolves, apparently)

Vampires:

• Didn't fly.
• Didn't shape change into anything (rats, bats, mist, etc).
• They reflected in mirrors, (though I don't think this was ever mentioned at all.)
• They didn't need blood straight from people or show any special desire to have blood at all (other than apparently drinking it from blood banks).
• They didn't have any mental powers or the ability to mesmerize.
• Didn't sleep in coffins (aside from two ancient, hibernating vampire elders) or grave dirt.
• There was never any mention of garlic, crucifixes, them needing to be invited inside before they could enter a house, and so on.
• Were created by a single bite from any other vampire, with the change coming almost immediately.
• They couldn't even see in the dark, which I found especially silly for so called "creatures of the night."  This was highlighted by a ridiculous "is that a werewolf coming up the black tunnel?" scene near the end of the movie.

In short they threw out the entire vampire mythology, other than some mentions of blood drinking, and those seemed to be very optional.  The vampires could fall from a great height and walk away, and once or twice one of them stuck to a wall/ceiling, but there was no real logic or intelligence to when they did it. In short they were humans with guns and black leather who died when shot with special photosynthetic bullets.  They showed no superhuman strength, no speed, no cunning or aristocratic guile, and used guns (with silver bullets) as their not-very-effective anti-werewolf weapons.

Werewolves:

• Could change from human to werewolf at any time, with no connection to the lunar cycle, other than one new werewolf who didn't have control of himself yet.
• Became werewolves if they were bitten by another werewolf, with no mention of rabies or the lycanthrope flower, or anything else in the mythology.
• Were apparently immortal, providing they didn't get killed by the "deathdealer" vampires.
• Had full control and human intelligence while in wolf form, with no hint of being mad with bloodlust or animalistic.
• Were all male (no reason was given for why no females, there just weren't any).
• Lived in dismal and uncomfortable sewers, despite apparently having full resources to purchase unlimited high tech weaponry and black leather wardrobes.
• Were said to be hunted to nearly the brink of extinction by the vampires, despite the fact that there were countless werewolves in the movie, and any werewolf could apparently make another werewolf at any time he wanted to, with just one bite.

My point is not that I totally object to the changes and modernizations and streamlinings the writers made to the historical mythologies of the creatures, it's that they took out all of the layers and complexities and richness, and didn't replace it with anything of much substance.  Given that there were endless unnecessary shots of people walking in and out of doorways, driving, waiting at gates, parking, etc, they could so easily have cropped 15 or 20 minutes of dead time and put in so much more information, action, mythology, character development, etc.

The real problems with the movie were the mediocre screenplay and very mediocre direction and editing.  There were some good scenes and lots of gothic atmosphere, and set decoration was frequently gorgeous, but they just did so much less with it than they could have.  I don't really agree with Ebert's review, but his comment on the director was informative and accurate.

"Underworld" is the directing debut of Len Wiseman, an art director ("Stargate," "Independence Day") who can stage great-looking situations but has few ideas about characters and plots.

A few random thoughts, both approving and scolding. Some of these are spoiler-y, in terms of giving away random cool things in the movie, though I don't talk about any plot points. 

¤ Never have movie characters expended so many bullets with so little accuracy.  Most of the big shoot outs seemed to star the 0% accuracy military squad who faced Neo and Trinity in the lobby of the building that Morpheus was held prisoner in, minus the acrobatic and super fast targets.  No one in the movie moved very quickly or made any real effort to avoid being shot; it was just that the ones with the guns sucked.  Characters would be within spitting distance of each other, each would unload hundreds of rounds, and one character would take a hit to the shoulder, if that.  The squib work was very sub-standard as well; sort of the opposite of the cool rubble-spitting bullets in the aforementioned Matrix shoot out.  Windows were broken, but there was no sign of walls being turned to rubble or even pockmarked by the machine gun battles taking place.

The characters also show very little gun battle savvy, even the ones who are supposedly very experienced in battle.  They stand still and shoot while making little effort to take cover, they only run or dodge after a long second of realizing they are in trouble or out of ammo, and they constantly fire their guns dry without making any effort to get into cover with a few bullets left so they can reload in safety.  Apparently, crouching with a flowing cloak in the middle of a grungy tunnel directly under a mysteriously-convenient street light while you slowly fumble in a new clip is much better than having it ready to begin with, or carrying multiple weapons, or hiding in a shadow to jack in a new clip.

Plus, as I mentioned, everyone wears black, the werewolves are mostly in human form, and the vampires (for the most part) look in no way special or desiccated, so in several shootouts near the end you have no idea who is shooting at who. Not that you particularly care at that point.  You don't care who is shooting, and you don't care who wins the battle.

¤ There was a distinct lack of good hand to hand combat.  The vampires are basically pasty white wimps who have no hope whatsoever in a fight with a werewolf that's transformed.  The overall hand to hand vamp vs. wolf body count is like 50 to 1 in favor of the werewolves. In fact that's not much different than the overall body count, plus very few of the vampires actually go out and fight, which makes you wonder just exactly how the werewolves are losing the war.

There is one super strong ancient vampire who does a nice hand to hand crushing blow, and the main female vampire Selene shows some extra strength once or twice, but that's pretty much it.  There's a cool scene in the trailer where Selene punches out some guys hand to hand, but you see the whole thing in the trailer; it lasts about 3 seconds on film.  It's a nice scene, which makes you wish they'd done more of it, or involved some better weapons.  More on that below.

Also note how long this review has gone before I felt any need to mention any character by name.  Take that as a sign of how interesting and individual they are.

¤ There's a cool scene in the trailer where Selene shoots holes in a floor and then falls down to another level.  It's in the movie, and she does it since a horde of werewolves are charging at her and her congenitally poor aim prevents her from shooting them in a narrow hallway with essentially unlimited ammunition. Okay, whatever.

However, she falls exactly one floor, and then stands there and thinks about it a bit, before running off.  There is then a chase scene outside the building that goes on for a long time, long enough for a werewolf she wounds several minutes after the floor-shooting to chase her car down.  The whole time I'm wondering, "Where did the 5 other werewolves go?"  They would have been down the hole she blasted in 3 seconds, and after her relentlessly.  Instead they just vanish once they are no longer convenient plot devices for the "shoot a circular hole in the floor" scene. Sloppy writing.

You might also notice that several Werewolves survive being shot since the soft silver bullets don't penetrate their bones very deeply. How those same bullets were able to blow straight through a hard floor and half a foot of wooden beams when Selene did her "shot a circle through the floor" routine is open todebate.

¤ Random pursuits. Of course they do the whole, "monster on the roof of the car" scene, where the main character driving never thinks to slam on the brakes and send the monster flying until he/she is shot or nearly shot/stabbed.  (Scenes from Terminator 2 & 3, as well as Road Warrior 3 immediately leap to mind as parallels.) In this one the werewolf on the roof tumbles down once she brakes, and then conveniently stands there thinking it over until she slowly backs up, and then slowly accelerates and hits him.  After which he watches her drive away, rather than running her down again.

There is a later scene where a human is in the vampire estate and runs away, and despite him being very important to their cause they just watch him go.  Can't they like, run super fast?  Drive after him?  It's miles to town and he's on foot; how hard would it be to find him just driving along the road?

There are several other scenes where people escape and no one makes much effort to chase them down, or people are forgotten the minute they are out of sight, etc. 

¤ Improbable and ineffective weapons.  I've already mentioned that they fire innumerable rounds with very little effect, but it's all so dumb.  No one can hit shit, but if they do hit an enemy it's hardly every lethal, though it does slow them down.  Might I suggest a shot gun?  Hard to miss with, and while they're down and writing from the silver or magical light bullets you can just finish them off with some close range blasts.

There is a cool scene in the trailer where a vampire has two whips and fights a werewolf with them.  That works about as well as you'd expect.  The werewolf gets scratched a few times, then walks in and devours the vampire.  Since 90% of the fights take place in narrow hallways, how exactly did the guy think those whips would come in handy against the tank-like werewolves who are hardly slowed by gunfire? Of course he got to use them in the one place that allowed him room to use them, but he predictably failed miserably with them anyway.

Selene has one scene where she uses throwing star thingies.  She is, of course, 100% accurate with them, compared to being about 2% accurate with her guns, but they are utterly pointless weapons.  Not even silver, apparently, and the werewolf she hits wears them like Christmas ornaments until he gets a chance to have them removed.

The lack of body armor was silly also.  The vampires are using silver bullets, which by necessity are not armor-piercing (the silver is too soft a metal).  The werewolves are using these gel-pack bullets that have some sort of liquid sunshine stuff, and those obviously aren't going to penetrate much without breaking.  Kevlar vests all around would have cut the body count by 95%. And it's not like they can't wear body armor of they'll be conspicuous in public; they are never in public, and in fact there isn't any public; they exist in this underworld where no inconvenient humans ever show up to create complications or interrupt their wild gun battles.

¤ As in most movies with immortal characters or evil organizations, there is no sign of how they finance themselves.  No one works, they spend a fortune on architecture and fashion, they have all the hardware and cars, etc.  Where does the money come from?  The vampires are mentioned to own several companies, but since none of them seem to have any tech savvy or real world experience, who handles the money?  Who provides the company direction?  Who builds all of the cool toys?

It's much the same for the werewolves, except they never mention any form of support.  We also never see anyone in the movie eat anything, go to the bathroom, never see any coffins for the vamps or even dry clumps of hay for the werewolves.  The fricking vampire mansion is like any other old country estate, including big glass windows everywhere, and bedrooms with them.  Um, hello, death by sunlight?  Black windows?  Interior sleeping rooms?  There was even a super customized vampire train with... you guessed it, tons of large, easily-broken glass windows.  Why in the hell do vampires who can't even see in the dark want windows in their train?

Obviously I don't want a full segment on "how they live" but the werewolves appear to inhabit a constantly wet sewer with no comforts at all, and the vampires live in a country mansion with no hint of the whole "we die in the sunlight" problem.  And that's not been removed from the mythos, one vampire dies from sunlight in one scene, and the special werewolf bullets have some sort of magical photosynthesis liquid in them. Fortunately it's always dark and almost always raining in the movie, so none of this matters.

¤ One of the coolest concepts was the creepy, desiccated, hibernation sort of thing the elder vampires engage in.  They are on some sort of long term schedule to be awoken after centuries of sleep, and the actual process of this is pretty damn cool, though the security protecting the ancient vampires (not to mention the room drainage) is ridiculously lacking.

However this exists purely for a small plot device.  There is no reason given why they need to or want to hibernate; they just do in order to let the incompetent vampire guy be in charge when shit starts to hit the fan.  Since the other vampires apparently live for centuries or longer, and never do the hibernation thing, why do the elders?

Plus, we see two of the elders and one is indeed an old man, though still very powerful, but the other is a female who looks about 22.  How is she an elder, and why, since she goes out like a bitch when it comes time to fight?

¤ One of the big missing elements was passion.

One of the main allures of vampires has always been the eroticism.  They seduce females, it's not all just attack and bite, and the bite should be a very erotic, sensual thing.  As I said earlier, there is 1 bite in the whole movie, and it's sort of sexy, but more done out of necessity. There is never a scene of a vampire being seductive or sensual or worldly, and there is no sex of any kind at any point in the movie.  Nor even any nudity, other than topless men who have just or are about to turn into werewolves.

The werewolves have it even worse.  There are no female wolves, and there is never any scene of any kind showing werewolves after female women. Apparently they just fight the vampires.  There isn't even any hint of homoeroticism, which would have added some interest and at least made them seem to have some urges, other than just wanting to kill vampires who wanted to kill them. There are several female vampires, but other than Selene they just flounce around the vampire estate and serve no purpose.

Plus, despite all of the sexy people and interesting costumes, there is never anything at all sexy about how they act or move or dress.  There are hot vampire women, and they put Selene in super tight latex for the whole movie, but there's never a close up of her or any good angles to see her, other than her face.  We don't need lingering and gratuitous crotch shots or something, but why put the females in tight or skimpy clothing and then never give the audience a good look at them?

The same goes for the men as well.  There are some topless shots of hunky guys, but they are always dirty or sweaty or covered in fake blood.  Perhaps some people get off on that, but where were the shots of really gorgeous vampires sliding into their beautiful suits?  Or hunky werewolves flexing as they healed?  Everyone was just dirty and grungy and covered in blood they never seemed to see any reason to wash off.

Even the human Michael, who was bitten early on, spent the rest of the movie with a huge, wet, oozing wound on one shoulder.  What made it doubly ridiculous was that he was a damn medical intern at a hospital with apparently one other employee and no patients. He can't put on a bandage or go to a doctor? Plus there's another scene were he saves Selene from drowning and puts a bandage on her, and then... falls asleep next to her underneath a pier.  Um, what happened to calling an ambulance, or perhaps the police to mention the monsters that just tried to kill you and destroyed most of your apartment building in the process?

And I don't just mean passion = sex.  I mean passion for anything.  We're supposed to believe that Selene is willing to risk everything for the man she just met, but there's no sign that she's in love or lust.  They have like one kiss, and he just looks at her, never touches her or seems attracted to her.  It's basically the whole Romeo/Juliet forbidden love between warring factions thing (with a twist), but if there was any evidence of love, I missed it.

And there doesn't seem to be any reason for either side to be.  They are supposed to be at war, but mostly they just do it like soldiers; going out to fight professionally.  There is never any weight given to the value of life; not even one's own life.  Think about it, if you could live forever, how eager would you be to go run into heavy enemy fire for basically nothing?  But they do, repeatedly, and for no real reason.  No one is ever afraid or especially happy or satisfied. They just do what they were going to do, and that's that.

Better writing would have improved this aspect greatly, and made us care at all more about the characters. 

¤ And lastly, we don't care. I had no idea who I was rooting for near the end.  Despite the main character, Selene, being a vampire, and hearing how she's been lied to, and seeing how she's in love (I guess) with the hunky Michael that everyone has been chasing... I could have cared less if she won or lost.  The werewolves are just hungry brutes with no redeeming characteristics, the vampires are stupid and decadent and scheming, so we're left with Selene and Michael, the star-crossed lovers characters, and I guess we're supposed to root for them to end up together and alive.

But how about the larger story?  Eh, whatever...

And it wasn't a case of the bad guys being shown to have a heart and us growing to like them and feeling torn in our loyalties; it was a case of not giving a shit which side won, since you didn't have anyone you liked enough to root for.

The fact that the movie ends with everything but a "to be continued..." sign doesn't help.  I don't know if they'll do a sequel; it wasn't a very good movie and I don't think it will make all that much money.  Perhaps if they can do it relatively cheaply, they'll go ahead with a #2 and hope the franchise will take off in Underworld II (U2?) if they get a better story and director.

It's damn hard for a half-decent action movie to not do well financially these days; special effects cost so much less than they used to with computer technology, you can make the movies without needing big stars to eat up $10 or $15m of the price tag, they tend to gross pretty well overseas as well as domestically, and then you are just about guaranteed $20 or $30m from the overpriced DVD sales.  So I guess with that said, a sequel is likely, so long as Underworld doesn't totally bomb. 

The main thing I took away from the movie was a desire to write my own novel/screenplay with vampires or werewolves or both.  Underworld had an interesting concept (though apparently it's mostly ripped off from some White Wolf RPG) with the war, and some of the plot points of Selene's back history were clever, but other than that it was pretty much a mess. Or at least could have been better 95% of the time.

Seeing how mediocre this one was, especially in the writing, just made me realize that the vampire and werewolf archetypes are far from played out when translated into the modern world, and while I don't have any burgeoning concepts for work starring either of the creature types, I am going to let my mind wander in that directly.  Previously I would have just told myself, "There's no point in even thinking about that sort of thing, since it's all been done to death."  But seeing that something relatively mediocre like Underworld's plot was enough to get this sort of financing and production going for it gives me great inspiration.

September 22, 2003

In Saturday's surprisingly-long Underworld review/discussion, I mentioned that they would probably make an Underworld 2, since this would would probably be profitable enough, largely because they didn't have to pay any of the unknown actors any money, and special effects are getting cheaper every year.  I had no idea just how cheap though, until looking at the weekend grosses on Box Office Mojo and seeing that Underworld cost just $22m, with an additional $20m in marketing.  Since it made over $22m this weekend and will likely clear at least $60m domestic, and again that much in overseas box office + DVD sales, it seems like a sequel is almost guaranteed.  The plot (such as it was) certainly was written to lead into at least one more movie in the series.

Speaking of Underworld (as I have been quite a bit lately) a couple of readers mailed in their thoughts on it.  First we have Reaperx90:

I saw Underworld last night as well, and may I say, you extracted much more from it than I did. I was just extatic that they managed to make a vampie movie without the jam packed night club full of pale, anorexic, gothic men and women, though they did put in the pale, anorexic women. But at least they weren't dancing erotically, discusting every non-pervert in the theater...on to some other things...

I don't know who made the choice to have the one man in the movie who can barely speak English reveal a pivotal plot point, but if I meet him, I will plunge my hand into his chest and feed him his own heart. I could not understand one word that guy was telling Victor. 

All of the bad shooting I noticed, but it has little impact on me since every action movie since the dawn of time has had characters whose aim is terrible. And then they go to a shooting range and unload 2 clips onto a small target 30 yards away, almost hitting the hole the previoius bullet hit every time. Hey, at least we can take solace in the fact that they actually had to reload at times...

And the plot makes no since. The way I see it, there was one guy with a dormant virus. He had two offspring, one bitten by the bat, the other by the wolf. They went to their respective clans. That works pretty well. But then, flash to present time, they speak of some guy whose virus wasn't awakened, and that Micheal is his decendent. Did the original father have another child or something? That is never clarified...for me at least...

OH! And that brings up another point that you acted like you missed. After Micheal was bitten, Seline said to him that most people died within an hour of being bitten. That means that the werewolves can't just spread like wildfire. Maybe their virus got too potent when they evolved into being able to transform at will...? It really goes against mythology, but it explains why they couldn't just spread like wildfire. 

All in all, it was a pretty bad movie. But I was more than satisfied to see a vampire movie that didn't involve the kind of crap I mentioned in the first paragraph. Oh, and just for the sake of mentioning it, there were both 1) a lesbian couple in the movie and 2) a pair of goths. Possibly homo-goths, as they were both males, but I couldn't tell. Heh...

His first point is one that Malaya and I discussed, as I bounced some of the things I was blogging about off of her while I was writing the review.  I listed the number of things that vampires and werewolves always do in movies, most of them things that were (sadly?) missing from Underworld, and she took it differently than how I meant it.  I was lamenting the lack of genre requisites, while she was happy that every cliche wasn't used.  So when Reaper says he's happy that they avoided the vampire nightclub scene, I'm sure Malaya would agree with him.

I forgot to mention the long explanatory speech by the dying werewolf guy who can't speak understandable English, but it's a good point.  Most of the werewolves have odd accents and voices.  Only three of them get more than a few words or growls of dialogue: The head werewolf is relatively understandable with a sort of faux-British accent, as best I recall.  Second is another huge black guy who talks with such a deep voice it's sort of absurd, and the third is this mad scientist sort of werewolf (at least I assume he's a werewolf, he never changes, even when doing so would save him from a vampire and some flimsy changes) guy who does all of the explaining in the scene Reaper mentions, and he's got a weird accent with a creaky voice at best; and that scene is done while he's supposed to be in great pain and badly injured.  The difficulty understanding him is at least partially to blame for my lack of clarity on the whole "immortal guy who had 2 sons and one became the first vampire while the other maybe became the first werewolf or maybe just passed on the genetic mutation that the werewolves are searching for in his ancestors 1000+ years later.

As for reloading, that was another silly bit.  Selene is using two automatic pistols most of the time, each of which would hold about 15 rounds in the clip.  She routinely fires bursts of half a dozen shots, and gets off at least 20 or 30 bursts before she pauses to reload. (Pausing to reload directly in the middle of hallways, in the light, while werewolves are running around, as I bitched about in the review last blog.)  I suppose if we can suspend our disbelief to the point that we'll buy vampires and werewolves, we shouldn't have any problem accepting magically-numerous bullets.  Pretend they're all Amazons in Diablo II, able to fire 20 arrows out with Multishot for ever arrow actually consumed from the quiver?

He also makes a point about the supposedly high fatality rate from a werewolf bite.  If we assume that holds true for humans bitten by vampires as well, it could do something to explain why there aren't legions and armies of each side. Well, not really, if the choice for the immoral and immortal monsters is to kill a lot of people trying to make more of themselves, or be exterminated, I think it's pretty obvious which option they'd take.  Also, how about some intelligence in things?  Each side has very advanced medical facilities and technologies; if your survival is dependent upon turning more humans into your type of creature, and it's a dangerous transformation, why not kidnap people and bite them once you've got them hooked up to medical equipment that could probably keep them alive?

Of course that's the sort of intelligence you can pretty much guarantee that you'll never see in any monster or action movie, much less one starring monsters.  And one more thing that makes me think I should write my own damn monster movies/novels.

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