2008 Woodie Awards
Characters in gothic thriller lack development
Daniel Peterson
Issue date: 2/1/06 Section: Features
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The movie "Underworld: Evolution" starts in 1202 A.D. with a group of medieval vampires who come across a small village ravaged by werewolves.
Everyone is dead, and there's some useless dialogue spat between characters until finally the dead villagers begin to turn into werewolves, or Lycans, as the movie wants you to call them.
And you better make sure you call them Lycans when you talk about the movie, because you might run into some dumb jerk who actually liked the movie and will so rudely correct you. Lycan is, of course, short for Lycanthrope, but for some reason the makers didn't want to call them that. So they shortened it to Lycan in order to emphasize their broad range of creativity.
The CGI has improved since the last film, but it's still very fake looking. It would be in the best interest of the producers to invest in something other than computer graphics because right now, most of the CGI in movies I've seen hasn't been convincing at all.
This sounds like a drastic measure, but you may be able to get better effects from puppeteers and make-up than CGI at this point.
The protagonist Selene (Kate Beckinsale) and her partner, the half-werewolf half-vampire Michael Corvin (Scott Speedman), come across this secret lab in mountains that they knew about, and go in. They find a dead werewolf that somehow remained intact (supposedly werewolves regress back to their human forms after they die).
Michael was like "Oh, man, this dead werewolf is still a werewolf, that blows my mind. How come it didn't change back?"
To which Selene replied, "It's been given an anti-regression serum, see?" showing him a tag on the werewolf, which plainly said:
"TO STOP REGRESSION."
Wow, good thing that tag was there, or I wouldn't have known what the hell was going on.
I'm not going to go any further into the story. I'll let you spend the $8.50 I didn't have to, because the folks at Pacific Theatres were nice enough to let me in for free. Actually, the real reason I won't continue with the story is because I really don't care to, and please don't waste your money to go see it.
Everyone is dead, and there's some useless dialogue spat between characters until finally the dead villagers begin to turn into werewolves, or Lycans, as the movie wants you to call them.
And you better make sure you call them Lycans when you talk about the movie, because you might run into some dumb jerk who actually liked the movie and will so rudely correct you. Lycan is, of course, short for Lycanthrope, but for some reason the makers didn't want to call them that. So they shortened it to Lycan in order to emphasize their broad range of creativity.
The CGI has improved since the last film, but it's still very fake looking. It would be in the best interest of the producers to invest in something other than computer graphics because right now, most of the CGI in movies I've seen hasn't been convincing at all.
This sounds like a drastic measure, but you may be able to get better effects from puppeteers and make-up than CGI at this point.
The protagonist Selene (Kate Beckinsale) and her partner, the half-werewolf half-vampire Michael Corvin (Scott Speedman), come across this secret lab in mountains that they knew about, and go in. They find a dead werewolf that somehow remained intact (supposedly werewolves regress back to their human forms after they die).
Michael was like "Oh, man, this dead werewolf is still a werewolf, that blows my mind. How come it didn't change back?"
To which Selene replied, "It's been given an anti-regression serum, see?" showing him a tag on the werewolf, which plainly said:
"TO STOP REGRESSION."
Wow, good thing that tag was there, or I wouldn't have known what the hell was going on.
I'm not going to go any further into the story. I'll let you spend the $8.50 I didn't have to, because the folks at Pacific Theatres were nice enough to let me in for free. Actually, the real reason I won't continue with the story is because I really don't care to, and please don't waste your money to go see it.