Format: DVD from Cortland Public Library on The New Portable.
Every now and then, a movie comes along and changes the game for everyone. You can tell this happens when it seems like everything for a couple of years references that movie. In 1999, that movie was The Matrix. Dozens of movies that followed did references to bullet time and other aspects of that movie world. Underworld is clearly an attempt to capitalize on the same sensibilities as The Matrix. I’d love to say that the vampire/werewolf plot aspects are a direct pull from the Twilight books, but this came out a couple of years before those books.
There isn’t a specific reference to bullet time in Underworld, but everything else seems to come directly out of the same universe filtered through there being vampires and werewolves. The story we’re told is that there is a long-standing feud between the vampires and the “lycans,” which is clearly an abbreviation of lycanthrope. We’re not going to call them werewolves; we’re going to go with lycans because it…sounds better? Cooler? Less stupid? Regardless, everything outside of the froufrou name for the werewolves is straight out of The Matrix. That’s everyone clad in leather, massive gun battles, people leaping around in ways that people in the real world can’t, and more. Oh, and it also has that washed-out black-and-white with steel blue look that so many science fiction movies seem to want to have. It’s not black-and-white, but it’s monochromatic, because…reasons.
