Real Movie Views

In this prequel to the Underworld franchise, we follow Lucian from birth to his liberation from slavery under the vampires, where begins in earnest the centuries-old war between Lycan and vampire.

Starring: Michael Sheen, Bill Nighy and Rhona Mitra

Movie Release: January 23, 2009

Genre: Action/Fantasy/Horror

Running Time: 93 minutes

Visually this movie is stunning.  With seamless CGI effects, dramatic lighting and perfectly choreographed and suspenseful fight scenes, director Patrick Tatapoulos pulls all the thrillingly eerie feel of the previous Underworld movies into this third installment.  The costuming is at times brilliant and at others merely awkward, but one supposes vampires get to flaunt fashion in any manner they choose.  The actors’ performances were, while not mind-blowing, more than adequate to the occasion and one suspects that Michael Sheen (Lucian), Bill Nighy (Viktor) and Rhona Mitra (Sonja) have quite a bit more in them if given the proper script.  In short, each technical segment of the movie came together to produce a film of fair-to-good quality which the easily satisfied moviegoer will find quite enjoyable.  If that sounds like praise so faint as to be damning, that’s because it is.

Where this movie fails is in the story.  The writers took an approximately twenty-second flashback from the first movie and expanded it into an entire script.  Stunningly, they manage to do this without giving Underworld fans a single scrap of new information.  At the end of the movie, one knows no more than what one already saw in the twenty-second flashback.  Rise of the Lycans can be best defined by what it does not have, and that is never a good sign.  It has no additional backstory.  It – inexplicably, due to the first movie’s proof of his importance during that timeline – has no Kraven.  It has no Kate Beckinsale, not even an expansion on her backstory, though we know this, too, happened at that point in the timeline or thereabouts.  It’s a movie about war and it has no war.  One blink-and-you-miss-it battle and the occasional short fight scene do not a war movie make.

Rise of the Lycans offers little more than a love story, and one the viewer has trouble working up excitement for as we’ve already seen the interesting bits.  The main focus of the plot is to instruct the viewer, with agonizing slowness, that Lucian and Sonja are deeply in love.  We don’t get to watch this happen either, however.  The viewer is introduced to the story after the fact.  Once we’ve been treated to eighty minutes of heartfelt assurances of this forbidden love, Sonja is killed.  We already knew this would happen.  We’ve even seen the death scene in a previous movie.  It is boring.  With the casus belli in place, the movie wraps up with Lucian on the verge of open warfare with vampires for personal reasons and leading Lycans with more general social indignities fueling their vengeance.

All in all, a decent movie but a poorly written and redundant story.  Rise of the Lycans lives to disappoint.

It was probably incredibly easy to cast the always-wooden Keanu Reeves to play the dispassionate alien Klaatu for this botched and completely flubbed remake of what is considered a classic, not only of the science fiction genre, but of film in general. With the remake of “The Day the Earth Stood Still” Hollywood once again looked to its past in an attempt at mining some creativity and turning it into dollar signs. Creative license for sure, since they couldn’t even seem to keep the basic premise of the Earth standing still intact.

The special effects seemed to be the only thing the directors and producers worried about. Be damned with the story and with the plot. Characters? Who needs characters, they’re just backdrops to the big scary robot and mysterious glowing spheres which have apparently been hidden around the globe since the 1920s observing the human race and the condition of the Earth.

“Your planet?” Klaatu asks of the Secretary of Defense, played gamely by Oscar-winner Kathy Bates, despite a script with the dimensional diversity of a piece of drywall. Of course, the director made Bates play it clueless. As if anyone intelligent enough to serve in the White House… oh, wait… never mind…

Any way, that gets us to the… female lead… played by Jennifer Connelly. Who tries, she really tries, to bring some life to this character, as a spunky and respected astro-biologist. They keep the idea of her being a single mother, with a deceased soldier husband.

But this film team manages to lose the humanity of the relationship Klaatu developed with the boy in the original film – which was one of the prime driving factors in the original for Klaatu to change his mind and give the human race another chance to clean up its act. And they give the audience a little boy who is so mouthy and unlikable that if in Klaatu’s position, would have caused any sentient being of any species to accelerate the plans to eliminate the human race from the planet, instead of halting them.

All in all, “The Day The Earth Stood Still” is so awful in direction, its script, and its plot, that no amount of “gee whiz” CGI animation can save it.