K-SCORE: 59
Directors: Len Wiseman, Patrick Tatopoulos, Mans Marland, Bjorn Stein, Anna Foerster, Peter Chelsam
Writers: Len Wiseman, Kevin Grevioux, Danny McBride, Dirk Blackman, John Hlavin, J. Michael Straczynski, Allison Burnett, Corey Goodman, Kyle Ward, Mark Klein
Starring: Kate Beckinsale, Scott Speedman, Bill Nighy, Michael Sheen, Shane Brolly, Kevin Grevioux, Tony Curran, Derek Jacobi, Rhona Mitra, Steven Mackintosh, Theo James, Stephen Rea, Michael Ealy, India Eisley, Charles Dance, Tobias Menzies, Lara Pulver, James Faulkner, John Cusack, Jeremy Piven
Spoiler Level: Total
So… here’s my understanding.
Sometime in the fifth or perhaps thirteenth century a lone traveller named Alexander Corvinus has two sons, who, by coincidence, are both victims of freak animal attacks - one bitten by a bat and one by a wolf. Against all odds and medical science, the bat victim turns into Marcus, the primordial vampire, and the wolf victim turns into William, a bloodthirsty werewolf who torments the lands of men and turns others into beasts who are not quite as large as he is. The father, Corvinus, also becomes immortal, but bears no resemblance to any spirit animal. He watches on as Marcus creates a whole race of vampires who have one strength: the ability to select when they stop aging (most men choose middle-aged or elderly, women obviously stop at exactly the shape of a lithe twenty-four-year-old.) Despite not dying naturally, they have a few weaknesses, namely the ability to die immediately when exposed to sunlight, (unless they’ve consumed the blood of Corvinus, which presumably they all have since they’re all descendants of Corvinus so further study is needed on the sunlight thing), silver, garlic, rare herbs, and of course dismemberment from sharp melee weaponry. Werewolves share none of these weaknesses, save for perhaps the silver thing, but even then only in the first one, but they are cursed with the stupid inability to realize they’re better at fighting in werewolf form than as their pathetic humanoid shapes, thereby dying rather easily to their selfish, violent vampire adversaries.
Marcus creates Viktor, who builds a castle and lords over the werewolves, while simultaneously battling against them and using them as slaves. When his favorite slave werewolf sleeps with his daughter Sonja ontop of a cliff, he burns her to a crisp and starts the war between the races of werewolves and vampires, which technically had already started. But! He must have predicted the war would take place for he preemptively had a prison constructed for William, knowing William was the most powerful of the werewolves and that Marcus would be sad if he just out and out killed him. Why Marcus feels beholden to Viktor, his creation, remains a mystery, especially since Marcus’s powers as a vampire are far greater than other vampires because he can literally transform into a bat… man. The others have only the power to mumble their dialogue through oversized bicuspids. Our heroine, Selene, is the youngest daughter in the family who constructs the prison for William. Upon its completion, Viktor murders the whole family except Selene who he transforms into a vampire and changes into a deathdealer, someone who kills werewolves, though she’ll find out later that those skills transfer rather easily to killing just about anything she pleases. Where she is when Sonja is being burnt up, is a mystery, because Viktor has both pieces of the key to William’s prison. The werewolf slave lover Lucian steals half of the key before raising his werewolf army.
“Despite tensions being rather high, things remain quiet for about fourteen hundred years. ”
Despite tensions being rather high, things remain quiet for about fourteen hundred years. The only substantial development is the vampires develop an irresponsible two-hundred year nap monarchy system whereby Marcus, Viktor, and the third highblood vampire Amelia, special because we’re told so, take turns ruling vampire kind. Though they mostly stick to one coven and doll out rule to lesser vampires if it’s not the coven they like. Then, right around the turn of the twenty-first century, Lucian finds a human with no acting ability whatsoever that has the perfect magical concoction of a blood to become a hybrid of both vampires and werewolves, which he really wants to do for reasons that never become clear - not in the entire franchise - even though it’s rather a large point of emphasis. Bites in this town are a dime a dozen, and Michael Corvin, the human, becomes a hideous blue-monstrosity that is basically a werewolf whose ribs are showing with no other magical or beneficial properties. Selene’s vampire coven is ruled by Craven, a craven, who picks a peculiar time to murder the highborne elder Amelia, but presumably not after she gives birth to Four, whose future involves netherrealm vampires, Tywin Lannister, and sleeping with teenage girls in post-apocalyptic Chicago. Four doesn’t know about his specialness and we don’t know about Four for quite some time. Because we’re focused on Selene, who decides this Michael guy is looking pretty okay in Avatar skin, and finds out that Viktor killed her family. Despite the centuries, the news is sour, and so she employs one of the well-established methods of killing millennia-old immortal beings: slicing a third of his head off with a sword.
Sadly, someone bled all over Marcus’s coffin. Marcus, upon waking up, decides he’s kind of pissed about Viktor imprisoning his brother William, which you might have thought he’d be over by now, since it was twenty lifetimes ago. He finds his father who had been waiting in the wings all this time to do an autopsy on Viktor and spend a few minutes hanging half of William’s key in a locker. Marcus steals that key and Corvinus performs a Vasquez Suicide in his final hours as the world’s only immortal human being. The other half Marcus finds on Selene, who he tracks through a vampire who is locked away with half nude vampire concubines and cocaine, but who nevertheless knows all the vampire things. After a few skirmishes, Marcus has what he needs to free William. Selene and Michael are both still alive and take the opportunity to writhe naked together in a shipping crate, whereby Michael pumps a baby into Selene, Eve, a hybrid who I suppose is technically half vampire and half half vampire half werewolf or 75/25 vampire/werewolf, who is also very important for reasons never disclosed. But first, Selene and Michael have to kill William and Marcus, whose only crimes are having been bit by animals a long time ago and not wanting to be imprisoned for a really long time. They accomplish this all-important murder using the well-established immortal killing method of ripping the top of a head off its lower jaw and punching a bat… man into the inexplicably still-spinning blades of a helicopter.
“Tywin... is leading an underground hovel of hobo vampires”
With everyone important dead, the humans descend on vampires and werewolves alike and create a dystopia where these murdering monsters are hunted down and eliminated before they can devastate the unsuspecting human populaces. Selene and Michael, chased by humans, are frozen to death in a lake, but freezing is not one of the well-established methods of killing immortals, so Selene wakes up twelve years later and quickly discovers that, while she was sleeping, the humans cut Eve from her defenseless womb. Eve wants to escape her human tormentors to Four, who, along with Tywin, is leading an underground hovel of hobo vampires, and with Selene’s help, they find those hobos and bring werewolves down upon them because just as moths are drawn to flames, werewolves are drawn to vampire homesteads that Kate Beckinsale has just arrived at. Four dies in the attack, but because dying offscreen isn’t a well-established vampire killing method, Selene is easily able to restart his heart by ripping open his chest cavity, grabbing the organ in her bare hand and squeezing gently a couple times. Then a random scientist girl discovers that all her coworkers for years have secretly been werewolves and is eaten. Selene rushes in with Four, too late to save anybody, but in time to murder a very tall werewolf with the well-established immortal killing method of inserting a live grenade into one’s auto-healing torso.
“defend the snow realm”
After this kerfuffle, Eve tells her mother that she doesn’t want to see her again, even though they just met, and Eve and Selene go on the run. Selene becomes obsessed with the notion of fate, given that the circumstances that dictated her life’s path were unlikely to say the least. She meets an engaged man named Jonathan in New York and forces him to push random elevator buttons and scour used bookstores in hopes that he can one day find her again and sleep with her. He eventually calls off his wedding to a healthy, loving, normal human fiance so that he can gaze longingly at Selene over a frozen pond in central park. Satisfied she’s ruined his life, Selene returns to her werewolf killing ways, now with an emphasis on running away. She’s captured and then voluntarily returns to a vampire coven run by a woman whose primary motivation is to change dresses more frequently than she moves from room to room. Selene sets to training this new coven in the ways of werewolf killing but is betrayed because betrayal is as ubiquitous to vampire culture as Facebook is to human culture. With Four’s help, Selene escapes to the snow coven where they’ve discovered the secret of being mummified and dying the tips of one’s hair blonde. There Four discovers that he’s Amelia’s daughter, and, I guess, cares about that, enough to defend the snow realm from more vampire and werewolf attacks. Selene falls in some ice and has to be mummified, but let’s be honest, she wanted those blonde hair tips, because they go great with skintight leather, which you have to wear when fighting Marius, who kind of looks like a hybrid of Michael, Craven, Lucian, and Marcus, and whose name is clearly a hybrid of Michael, Craven, Lucian, and Marcus. Selene discovers through bloody osmosis that Marius found frozen Michael and killed him, finalizing the list of his accomplishments as the second most important character in the franchise at:
Slept with Selene
Turned blue
Selene is voted into the position of high elder to rule alongside Four in a vampire coven that now contains far fewer vampires. That she continues to support vampire causes, despite more betrayals, remains, like so much, a mystery. The biggest mystery, of course, is: where do all these people/vampires/werewolves get their funding?
People are always telling me, “Kyle, I know how much you love when a story is put in the hands of ten to fifteen writers and creators, but it just never pans out. You end up changing the rules, contradicting yourself, messing up your premise, breaking the foundations on which the story is built.” And I’m like, “Naw. Just look at Underworld.”