Unnecessary Review
I watched "Underworld III" last night. I know that pointing out the flaws, logical fallacies and continuity errors in these movies is a bit like wrestling a two-year-old. However, since I've been told that I shouldn't be so critical of the Transformers movies because "they're summer blockbusters; they're supposed to be shallow fun", I feel it's within my rights to extend that argument - I derive basic, visceral entertainment from ripping bad movies apart. If it's too easy, well, that's really what these films and their abominable sequels are for, isn't it: shallow fun? This is my cheap entertainment. So let me just grab the nearest lucha mask and we'll get to it.
First, a general complaint: Why, in a movie about vampires and werewolves, do we see no vampires ever actually feeding on human beings? What is it that makes them vampires, exactly? Unlike Twilight, these vampires at least have the decency to be allergic to sunlight, but are otherwise just as badly conceived as their Meyersesque counterparts. They don't ever seem to get hungry; when we do see Victor taking a drink, it's out of a glass. Granted, there are human prisoners, but they are obviously not being fed on, since we see them being lined up and forcibly transformed into "Lycans" - a term which, by the way, sticks in my fucking craw for the pretentious white-wolf/otherkin nonsense it is. As I recall, Michael shows that he can't eat cooked food in the second movie, indicating that he can only eat a fresh kill (which we don't really get to see him do). In the newest installation, you have two rather gigantic populations of creatures who are known to feast on blood or fresh prey, respectively, yet there doesn't appear to be human or animal stock on hand capable of supporting either.
I know that in many stories we don't bother showing the characters eating or shitting without good reason, but when your whole premise is based on a war between predators and parasites, it strikes me as odd to completely ignore the species most inclined to be their host/prey. In the third movie, the only time Victor interacts directly with a non-slave human, he throws him into a wall. He's trying to instill fear in the other humans: why not show him drinking one? Wouldn't it be more effective than just being able to snap their necks? The werewolves are even sillier - they are supposed to be brutal, violent and vaguely rapacious, but they always appear to be holding back on the humans.
My bigger problem with the third movie is the continuity and plot. "Underworld III" had a really difficult task in the first place: retell a story we'd already learned about in the first two movies, and tweak it enough to keep it interesting as a standalone story. Not easy, I admit. The trick is in the delivery, which struck me as alternately absurd and underdeveloped. The characters are supposed to be immortal plotters and schemers.
The only one who comes close is the librarian character, Tannis. We've met him before, in the second movie. Best characterization in both movies, in my opinion. He's the only one with a sense of perspective, but even he's simpleminded, considering that he's supposed to be many centuries old and an immortal schemer. Of course, almost every vampire story I've ever read or seen comes into this problem. The character may be thousands of years old, but is inevitably limited to the writer's imaginative capacity. That said, the writers of these movies have a limited capacity indeed.
Down to the most basic - the final battle, the confrontation between Victor and Lucien. I felt cheated. We knew from the beginning who would survive, who wouldn't, and how. Again, it's the delivery that counts. These two have been psyching up for a battle from the beginning - their story is Shakespearean tragedy, their rivalry epic. Each blames the other for the death of woman (who, btw, was also less impressive than she ought to have been, though still more interesting than either of the men). The plot was there. The payoff wasn't.
The rivals' fight was short and limp-wristed, and was brought to a conclusion by simultaneously invoking a cliche and a continuity error. Lucien realizes that the ceiling is really poorly kept, so he pulls holes in the ceiling, exposing Victor to daylight... except that the battle was taking place in the middle of the night. Naturally, there's an underground river into which Victor can fall, healing himself despite taking the sort of wounds which have been consistently killing his vampiric brethren throughout the film, and thus escape into his steampunkmagicaltwirlylock coffin. Any number of loose ends, but that's fine. We know how most of the surviving characters die, though, and since there really weren't any introduced that we hadn't already met future versions of, the viewer is left to wonder - so what?
A good prequel ought to leave us with some new revelatory information, something which puts a new twist on the story and tests the assumptions established in its counterparts, without violating logic or continuity. "Underworld III" accomplishes none of this. The story is told exactly as it was in the earlier films, with almost nothing fleshed out except to point out the involvement of a couple of characters that we already know are going to die - except now their deaths seem that much more disappointing, since none of them actually accomplishes anything they set out to do. None of the characters learns anything, nothing is introduced that could make the later movies more interesting, and the setting is just as lackluster in its "heyday" as it appears to be later on. Are vampires really just that bad at simple housekeeping?
It's a point of bitter irony for me that, since I love vampire stories so much, I'm increasingly dissatisfied with them. Genre storytelling is the easiest and hardest to accomplish - the author is given a number of elements to work with and a cultural history kept alive by rabid fans who are as unforgiving as we are obsessed. The trick is in the telling, in the spin and the perspective. It is still possible to tell a good vampire story (see "Let the Right One In" for a very recent example), but this requires some faith in the material and the ability to make it more interesting to the audience. Naturally, I'm now feeling compelled to tell my own vampire story, just to prove to myself that I can. Heaven deliver us from shoddy work.
First, a general complaint: Why, in a movie about vampires and werewolves, do we see no vampires ever actually feeding on human beings? What is it that makes them vampires, exactly? Unlike Twilight, these vampires at least have the decency to be allergic to sunlight, but are otherwise just as badly conceived as their Meyersesque counterparts. They don't ever seem to get hungry; when we do see Victor taking a drink, it's out of a glass. Granted, there are human prisoners, but they are obviously not being fed on, since we see them being lined up and forcibly transformed into "Lycans" - a term which, by the way, sticks in my fucking craw for the pretentious white-wolf/otherkin nonsense it is. As I recall, Michael shows that he can't eat cooked food in the second movie, indicating that he can only eat a fresh kill (which we don't really get to see him do). In the newest installation, you have two rather gigantic populations of creatures who are known to feast on blood or fresh prey, respectively, yet there doesn't appear to be human or animal stock on hand capable of supporting either.
I know that in many stories we don't bother showing the characters eating or shitting without good reason, but when your whole premise is based on a war between predators and parasites, it strikes me as odd to completely ignore the species most inclined to be their host/prey. In the third movie, the only time Victor interacts directly with a non-slave human, he throws him into a wall. He's trying to instill fear in the other humans: why not show him drinking one? Wouldn't it be more effective than just being able to snap their necks? The werewolves are even sillier - they are supposed to be brutal, violent and vaguely rapacious, but they always appear to be holding back on the humans.
My bigger problem with the third movie is the continuity and plot. "Underworld III" had a really difficult task in the first place: retell a story we'd already learned about in the first two movies, and tweak it enough to keep it interesting as a standalone story. Not easy, I admit. The trick is in the delivery, which struck me as alternately absurd and underdeveloped. The characters are supposed to be immortal plotters and schemers.
The only one who comes close is the librarian character, Tannis. We've met him before, in the second movie. Best characterization in both movies, in my opinion. He's the only one with a sense of perspective, but even he's simpleminded, considering that he's supposed to be many centuries old and an immortal schemer. Of course, almost every vampire story I've ever read or seen comes into this problem. The character may be thousands of years old, but is inevitably limited to the writer's imaginative capacity. That said, the writers of these movies have a limited capacity indeed.
Down to the most basic - the final battle, the confrontation between Victor and Lucien. I felt cheated. We knew from the beginning who would survive, who wouldn't, and how. Again, it's the delivery that counts. These two have been psyching up for a battle from the beginning - their story is Shakespearean tragedy, their rivalry epic. Each blames the other for the death of woman (who, btw, was also less impressive than she ought to have been, though still more interesting than either of the men). The plot was there. The payoff wasn't.
The rivals' fight was short and limp-wristed, and was brought to a conclusion by simultaneously invoking a cliche and a continuity error. Lucien realizes that the ceiling is really poorly kept, so he pulls holes in the ceiling, exposing Victor to daylight... except that the battle was taking place in the middle of the night. Naturally, there's an underground river into which Victor can fall, healing himself despite taking the sort of wounds which have been consistently killing his vampiric brethren throughout the film, and thus escape into his steampunkmagicaltwirlylock coffin. Any number of loose ends, but that's fine. We know how most of the surviving characters die, though, and since there really weren't any introduced that we hadn't already met future versions of, the viewer is left to wonder - so what?
A good prequel ought to leave us with some new revelatory information, something which puts a new twist on the story and tests the assumptions established in its counterparts, without violating logic or continuity. "Underworld III" accomplishes none of this. The story is told exactly as it was in the earlier films, with almost nothing fleshed out except to point out the involvement of a couple of characters that we already know are going to die - except now their deaths seem that much more disappointing, since none of them actually accomplishes anything they set out to do. None of the characters learns anything, nothing is introduced that could make the later movies more interesting, and the setting is just as lackluster in its "heyday" as it appears to be later on. Are vampires really just that bad at simple housekeeping?
It's a point of bitter irony for me that, since I love vampire stories so much, I'm increasingly dissatisfied with them. Genre storytelling is the easiest and hardest to accomplish - the author is given a number of elements to work with and a cultural history kept alive by rabid fans who are as unforgiving as we are obsessed. The trick is in the telling, in the spin and the perspective. It is still possible to tell a good vampire story (see "Let the Right One In" for a very recent example), but this requires some faith in the material and the ability to make it more interesting to the audience. Naturally, I'm now feeling compelled to tell my own vampire story, just to prove to myself that I can. Heaven deliver us from shoddy work.