Underworld

I'm not really one to discuss movies here, but well, this week it's either this, Disgaea, or total drivel. Besides, it's about time I take a good swing at the uselessness of previews.

I started seeing previews for Underworld pretty constantly, several months before anyone else I know had heard of it. Come to think of it, most people I know have only heard of it by my griping at the lack of info given by these previews. It was something like two months before I was clued in that Underworld is a movie about vampires vs. werewolves, and prior to that all there really was to go on was: looks Matrixish, based on the title it's likely about demons or something, or possibly organized crime.

The came the reviews. I've come across four or five people's thoughts on this movie, and they all contradicted each other to a profound degree. "There's no plot at all, just a lot of mindless action and Matrix effects, but it's fairly interesting visually." "There was such a complicated backstory that I felt like I had to take notes to keep everything straight. Really low budget too." "The whole movie follows this Romeo and Juliet sort of love story." "I heard there was some sort of love story in here, but I never saw it."

Eventually, all this conflicting information drove me to take up some sort of quest for the truth, so seeing as I hadn't had a chance to get out of the house in quite a while, I went out and saw the darn thing.

First and foremost. This movie does not even remotely resemble The Matrix. Yes, the vampires tend to go around wearing black trenchcoats and packing a fair number of guns, but that's coincidental. I mean, vampires in modern settings wear big black high collared trenchcoats. That's pretty much an accepted fact. Werewolves meanwhile are traditionally killed with silver bullets. Makes guns a bit necessary. We do not however have any martial arts going on, or crazy acrobatic gunplay, and most importantly of all, not once was there a slow motion camera rotation.

More to the point, Underworld isn't even an action movie. It's something like 90% dialog. There's honestly enough plot in this movie that they could have easily made it into a TV series instead of a movie. Probably would have worked better that way actually. Sure, there's a couple fight scenes in there, and they're fairly interesting, but they are by no means the focus. Nor is the focus a love story, let me get that straightened out here and now. Any love to be found in the movie is ancient backstory and/or unrequited. Speaking of backstory, yes, there is a lot of it, but I wouldn't say it's too complicated. A good chunk of the movie hinges on stuff the various characters set in motion 500 years or so ago, but that's to be expected from a movie about a bunch of immortal monsters. Thankfully though, it DOESN'T get into all this backstory via constant flashbacks. Just subtle characters-piece-things-together-through-various-clues sorta stuff.

Also on the matter of the plot, it was, in my opinion, quite good. Nicely complex characters, a plot twist or two of a surprisingly original nature that really make you re-evaluate things, etc. The characters actually seemed to have a pretty disturbing degree of history too. To the point that if I didn't know better I'd think the movie was a continuation of some obscure old series that expected all the viewers to be fans. My actual theory though is that it's based on someone's RPG campaign. I mean that as a compliment mainly though.

So anyway, now that I've driven home the not Matrix-ness, time to address the nerdy issues. Well, there's really just the one. "Uh, dude. Vampires would totally mop the floor with werewolves." Yup. They sure would. This is totally acknowledged and accounted for here. The movie starts off around when the vampires are getting pretty close to having wiped werewolves out of existence in fact. Thus the werewolves pretty much have to rely on craftiness and such.

There. I've pretty much said my piece now. Not necessarily suggesting you all run out and watch it, but if you were basing your decision on whether or not it was a generic Matrix-ripoff Hollywood action flick, it isn't generic, it doesn't rip off the Matrix, it wasn't made in Hollywood (British I believe), and it isn't an action flick. Oh yes, and it also has the same person as writer and director, which I strongly suspect is a requirement for a movie not to suck. Oh, and to save you the trip to the IMDB, previous credits of this writer/director include: Squat.

Oh yes, and my only major complaint with the movie by the way: I can see the logic in calling werewolves "lycans" (that logic being that it's short for lycanthrope), but it sounds like you're talking about freaking moss.

By the way, I feel the need to mention the previews before this movie. We have a special edition rerelease of the original Alien. I don't think it needs it myself. We have a remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Strikes me as odd. A movie based on House of the Dead. I don't have space here to explain how horribly wrong it is to combine zombies and Matrix effects, let alone the other flaws. Finally, a second Resident Evil movie. The concept sickens me, but at least the preview was pretty amusing, being in the form of an advertisement for Umbrella's pharmacutical branch. So it seems next month will be full of horror movies I don't want to see, two of which are based on zombie filled videogames. Sad part is, that's still better than most months as movies go.