Yet another Underworld review.

[puddingcat]

I think winterthing said it best when she compared it to a Cam game with decent props. Yes, there are White Wolfish elements to it, certainly enough to make an intellectual property lawsuit a sensible idea, but it was a lot more fun and less "huh?" without trying to map it all out in game rules.

For the benefit of anyone reading who may be making films in the future, I'm sick of Wire Fu. Done to death and nothing special any more. Get people doing martial arts for real, or think up another cool idea.

Clothing. Well, it looked like a Cam game would, if all the players actually looked like their "gorgeous, beguiling, seductive, etc" characters. Thinking about some of the people who'll start wearing pvc and rubber now terrifies me. Oh, and where were the ties of her corset? Every time I've seen someone wearing one, there are miles & miles of spare lacing tied at the back in a great sodding bow.

Another "sick & tired of" thing. Coloured contact lenses. They don't look real, probably because they sit on the front of the lens instead of behind the cornea. So putting them on people when they're supposedly in frenzy just looks silly; why (and how) would someone's iris migrate to in front of the lens just when they really need to see accurately?

And the cutting-his-head-in-half thing near the end? Soooo Resident Evil.

Why did Selene kiss Michael? She's a bloody vampire. An undead killer. Inhuman. A top-of-the-range predator, who repeatedly shows no qualms about shooting people repeatedly and at point blank range. Not a whiny little kid whose first boyfriend's in a mood.

And finally, something davywavy has often said about Cam characters. If they really existed, possibly 1 or 2 in the whole country might survive more than a few years. The same went for the Underworld characters - Viktor was the only one (well, until the point where Selene trusted Kraven for No Reason At All, and Viktor seemingly forgot everything he'd ever learned about common sense and survival) who made me think "oooh, now he's a real vampire". I'm looking forward to "Shaun of the Dead" even more now I know the actor's in that, too.

Ah well. I'll buy it, but only when it's been out long enough to get in the sales :)

Comments

Preconceptions

[halfsetgelly.livejournal.com]

Just wondering how much your expectations of what you think/expect a vampier to be has had on your oppinion of the film. How much you looking at it in terms of white wolfs idea of a vampire and fit it into those ideas?

Re: Preconceptions

[puddingcat.livejournal.com]

Lots for the first 10 minutes, then I let go & took it at face value. The gripes are mostly to do with film production values & script. I still think very few of the vampires would have survived in any world, behaving as they did, let alone in a gothic-punk world (be it White Wolf's or anyone else's).