Full movie spoilers for Underworld: Awakening below.
Alternatively, the movie could have been called Where’s Michael? Thankfully the answer was, ‘only in the first five minutes of the movie’ because he bores me to tears.
I have an unabashed love for the Underworld series. I remember being at SDCC in 2003 and having a newspaper passed to me that was full of mock articles on subway attacks and vampire legends, all advertising a film coming out in September.
The movies are not Oscar material. They’re not an acting tour de force. When the original came out, the werewolf effects were impressive, but they’re less notable now.
However, they are action films I can watch without regret (Evolution being the lowest point of the series). All of the movies have a female main character who kicks ass. Selene, especially, is relentless and merciless. It is a series with vampires and werewolves where both sides are actually monsters. There is no excuse made for the fact that they kill humans and each other in brutal ways. Even when they have human partners, there is no weeping over their partner’s mortality. They live, they get turned, or they die in the crossfire.
Awakening threw a lot of new variables into the equation. Selene is still one of the best dirty fighters in the business, but she’s been locked up in a lab for twelve years and has ended up with a cloned daughter in the process. Eve - the name’s in the credits, she’s referred to as Subject 2 through most of the film - kicks as much ass as her mother. The effects kind of fell short there, but it’s interesting to watch a movie where a child isn’t given an innate shield from violence or being violent.
Unlike some other action-oriented women, Selene doesn’t lose her punch or think of retiring because she has a child. She’s not encouraged by the narrative or even her own society to stop fighting. Eve isn’t helpless either. She even destroys the man who literally dehumanized her with a very fun callback.
In comparison to other films of the series, there were more women present in general, even in background roles. There was even (briefly) a female werewolf viewed with several more implied by the amount of women working in the Antigen labs. Eve picks up the slack as the hybrid in place of Michael.
And no one gets called a bitch or a whore. There are no gay jokes or the obligatory camera shot where the main star bends over and gets followed up the lower half of her body. Beckinsale is in her standard leather catsuit as always, but the first thing you see of her is almost always her weapons. She fights like hell, she fights smart, and she wins.
Awakening is not the next breaking-all-the-box-offices action hit, but it’s a movie I can stand to see with a female hero who isn’t reduced to her ass or suddenly shoved out of the action because she happens to have a child. Despite the two new men who appear on the horizon, Selene isn’t forced to cry on their shoulders or be rescued. In fact, she saves them both instead.
