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Underworld Evolution
Aug. 17th, 2006 01:16 pmOr How I Stopped Caring And Learned To Love Black PVC.
Hmm. Underwhelmed Evolution maybe. It just didn't hang together for me. There were bits that were nice (mostly centred around the aforementioned black PVC), the blood-memories idea was explored more playfully, the makeup effects were great, but... but Michael the down-home farmboy hybrid just looks like he's about to start singin'; Kate still runs like a barbie-doll even if her action-stance has got better; and guys, the colour-changing eye thing was done better in Innocent Blood over fifteen years ago. Try harder.
The layers of secret spookernatural society are annoyingly built and revealed in a manner that suggests not a rich parallel world into which we are plunged (as Nightwatch does so well), but stuff being made up as they go along. And since the main plot is a great fat retcon in the first place, I got the feeling that I couldn't trust the world at all, I couldn't engage with it because it was so arbitrary. Is he going to be okay? Is she going to find out what happened? Who cares, here's a church full of naked chicks. All of which leaves us with a skinny goth chick with guns - perfectly tasty but as a snack, not a meal.
Yay, black helicopters. Boo, physics going AWOL whenever a Lycan gets jumping. Yay, pimpy cinematography. Boo, every frame looks like a graphic-novel panel so the specialness is just lost, the "ooh!" effect is squandered. Yay, manipulated colour palette, boo grey is not the one I'd lead with... I'm just left annoyed that at the end of the first movie there's a suggestion that Everything Will Change, then the second movie is another Day In The Life Of Slay-Chick, and at the end guess what, Everything Will Change.
It will. I won't bother renting #3.
Hmm. Underwhelmed Evolution maybe. It just didn't hang together for me. There were bits that were nice (mostly centred around the aforementioned black PVC), the blood-memories idea was explored more playfully, the makeup effects were great, but... but Michael the down-home farmboy hybrid just looks like he's about to start singin'; Kate still runs like a barbie-doll even if her action-stance has got better; and guys, the colour-changing eye thing was done better in Innocent Blood over fifteen years ago. Try harder.
The layers of secret spookernatural society are annoyingly built and revealed in a manner that suggests not a rich parallel world into which we are plunged (as Nightwatch does so well), but stuff being made up as they go along. And since the main plot is a great fat retcon in the first place, I got the feeling that I couldn't trust the world at all, I couldn't engage with it because it was so arbitrary. Is he going to be okay? Is she going to find out what happened? Who cares, here's a church full of naked chicks. All of which leaves us with a skinny goth chick with guns - perfectly tasty but as a snack, not a meal.
Yay, black helicopters. Boo, physics going AWOL whenever a Lycan gets jumping. Yay, pimpy cinematography. Boo, every frame looks like a graphic-novel panel so the specialness is just lost, the "ooh!" effect is squandered. Yay, manipulated colour palette, boo grey is not the one I'd lead with... I'm just left annoyed that at the end of the first movie there's a suggestion that Everything Will Change, then the second movie is another Day In The Life Of Slay-Chick, and at the end guess what, Everything Will Change.
It will. I won't bother renting #3.
