Director: Mans Marlind and Bjorn Stein.
Starring: Kate Beckinsale, Michael Ealy, Stephen Rhea, Theo James, India Easley, Charles Dance
Distributor: Independent
Runtime: 88 mins. Reviewed in Jan 2012

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Rating notes: Strong violence, blood and gore

Underworld: Awakening is the fourth in a series of films about vampires and were-wolves (called Lycans), which has as its hero a Marvel Comics’‘mutant’vampire called Selena (Kate Beckinsale), who is not only immortalbut invulnerable to daylight, and able to heal herself from horrific injuries with incredible speed.

In this instalment, filmed in 3D, Selena awakens from a cryogenic sleep of 12 years, and finds herself in a world where Vampires and Lycansare engaged in an all-out war against humans, who have discovered their existence and are intent on destroying them.

Vampires and Lycans are themselves mortal enemies and each survives only in isolated clans. In this war of the species, Selena finds herself allied with David (Theo James), the son of a Vampire clan Elder (Charles Dance) who is hostile to Selena joining their ‘coven’, and ahuman detective called Sebastian (Michael Ealy), whose wife was a Vampire forced to suicide during what is called‘The Purge’.

But the greatest threat to this treeless, twilight world of urban canyons is Dr Jacob Lane (Stephen Rhea), head scientist at the research laboratory Antigen, whose success at creating an ‘antidote’ to eradicate Vampires and Lycans threatens everyone.

Through her vampire series of novels (Interview with the Vampire, The Queen of the Damned etc) Anne Rice was one of the first to reintroduce vampires into contemporary fiction. What made these books compulsive reading was her humanisation of vampires. They were no longer aliens, but metaphors of ourselves. It’s the same in Underworld: Awakening, up to a point.

In this line-up of so-called heroes and villains, it’s hard to know who to barrack for. Selena, somewhat of an outcast, is the front-runner, with her Gothic chic, incredible athleticism, and occasional tears. Early in the film Selena discovers that she has a daughter, Eve, whose father Michael (her lover from Underworld:Evolution)was a ‘hybrid’. Clearly this is a multicultural world, much like our own, where ‘good’ and ‘bad’has little to do with ‘nationality’ (Vampire, human, Lycan, hybrid).

But unlike Rice’s world of vampires or demons, where the criteria for what we would call ‘human values’ are spelled out clearly, are enjoyably complex, and mostly approximate our own, this doesn’t exist.

Instead in the endless battle for survival (which for almost the entire film runs like an ultraviolent computer game), the baddies are those who look the most awful, in which case Stephen Rhea (overacting badly), and the Lycans (who look like a cross between minotaurs and dinosaurs) win hands down.