UNDERWORLD : RISE OF THE LYCANS (2009)
This is another odd series where for some reason they didn’t
just start at the beginning. They started way after that, then decided to
backtrack to fill in some details. So if you start watching the UNDERWORLD
series (and you should, it’s the best vampire series ever made), you are going to want to star with this installment. In this one
we are offered an origin story as to how the Lycans came about via the story of
Lucian. Lycans are basically werewolves
that can change at will and maintain their human personalities once they become
werewolves. Werewolves in most lore are not aware of what they were doing when
the wake up etc. Lycans don’t have those issues.
The main vampire king figure in this is Viktor (played by Bill Nighy) and he is running a massive castle in the middle of nowhere. He is just keeping all the humans running scared by telling them if they don’t give him some form of money, he will have his coven stop protecting them from werewolves. It’s a pretty sweet deal, but he’s got a lot of hang ups about the bloodline of the aristocrats and just is not having it when his daughter falls in love with Lucian. Lucian is just basically a slave for the vampires and he gets a few special privileges because Viktor just lets some dudes have that I guess. Eventually Lucian rises up after seeing his fellow slaves get treated like crap and we have an uprising on our hands. That uprising isn’t initially even about Viktor, but oh man, it’s gonna be.
The main vampire king figure in this is Viktor (played by Bill Nighy) and he is running a massive castle in the middle of nowhere. He is just keeping all the humans running scared by telling them if they don’t give him some form of money, he will have his coven stop protecting them from werewolves. It’s a pretty sweet deal, but he’s got a lot of hang ups about the bloodline of the aristocrats and just is not having it when his daughter falls in love with Lucian. Lucian is just basically a slave for the vampires and he gets a few special privileges because Viktor just lets some dudes have that I guess. Eventually Lucian rises up after seeing his fellow slaves get treated like crap and we have an uprising on our hands. That uprising isn’t initially even about Viktor, but oh man, it’s gonna be.
The sets in this movie are spectacular giving a very dark ages kinda feel and the effects are over the top spectacular. In fact, you can just go ahead and say that about this whole series. Where things do suffer a bit is during the sequence where they are trying to show the extent of Lucian (played by Michael Sheen) and Sonja (played by Rhona Mitra), unfortunately that scene goes just a little bit whacky, and ends up feeling kind of silly overall. You do however, get a well-acted, well-paced, cinematically fantastic triumph of a motion picture here which in my view is better than the first 2 installments even though it goes back in time.
One thing to keep in mind. If you are going into see a bright cheer fest with tons of jokes, you came to the wrong movie. The aesthetic is very dark and there is almost no sunlight in this whole thing. So if you had issues with any of the Zack Snyder DC films, it’s going to be a long night for you.
I give Underworld : Rise of the Lycans a 6 out of 7. It’s not a perfect movie due to at least one really strange scene and a downer ending (we knew was coming), but it comes pretty darn close.
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