Underworld: Rise of the Lycans

On Monday the weather reports were ominous. A storm was bearing down on New England and was expected on Wednesday to dump up to a foot of snow across northern Massachusetts. On the heels of yet another Arctic blast, this felt like outright cruelty from nature.

On Tuesday I decided I had better use the opportunity to squeeze in a couple movies before the storm hit, given that I'd probably be cooped up inside for at least a day. By late afternoon, I settled on a quick jaunt over to Leominster to see Underworld: Rise of the Lycans. It didn't seem like a movie that would be in theaters very long.

When I got to the steps of the multiplex, I was informed by a printed sign that I had lost the lottery, in that my movie was showing in one of the auditoriums with no heat. In December I'd seen Delgo in the same conditions, so I figured it would be fine. But when I walked into Auditorium 10, I immediately felt a cold blast like I was walking into a freezer.

Throughout the movie I sat nearly alone in the huge four-hundred person auditorium, completely bundled up with my hat and gloves on. Even this wasn't enough, in that halfway through the movie I had to retract my fingers from my gloves and keep my toes curled in my shoes for warmth. Mercifully the movie was short, only slightly over ninety minutes.

I have not yet seen the other two movies in the Underworld series, so I wasn't sure how I'd like this one. But since it was a prequel, it seemed like it was as good as any place to start.

The story takes place in the Middle Ages in the Balkans. Besides humans, there is a race of (intelligent, humanlike) vampires and a race of (animal-like) werewolves. The two races are at war with each other. Certain half-human werewolves are used by the vampires as slaves to guard them in their citadel during the daylight hours. The story revolves around the leader of the half-human werewolf slaves (Michael Sheen, in quite a switch from Frost/Nixon) and his clandestine romance with the daughter of the leader of the vampires.

For a movie with such overt fantasy to work for me, there must be an obvious subtext involving contemporary socioeconomic conditions. In this case, the movie did not let me down, in that the vampire-werewolf war seemed like a thinly disguised parable about the enormous divisions of wealth between the globalized corporate billionaire overclass and the rest of us. The vampire leader even speaks about "increasing his holdings" like a hedge fund manager.

In fact the movie was quite pleasing in this regard. One of the features of classic Hollywood movies that has completely disappeared in contemporary cinema is an open consciousness of class divisions. The disparity between the "rich" and the "rest of us" appeared repeatedly in movies from the 1920s through the 1950s, but then it slowly began to disappear in the more "egalitarian" culture that emerged.

But it now seems as if discussion of class issues has become taboo in Hollywood, where rich people are portrayed as normal and middle-class. Everyone always has money, or recourse to it, in order to get by. The fact that every (white) character in New York movies has an oversized apartment is a manifestation of this denialism, which has fed our blindness during the building of the phony bank-created megawealth over the last few decades.

In a previous era, the class issues of Underworld: Rise of the Lycans would have been told in a more straight-forward fashion, at least using humans and not supernatural creatures. Seeing the movie made me glad that such stories can still be told, even if they have to go to such great lengths of fantasy cloaking.

The story is violent and very guy-oriented, but it held together well, even in such a chilly auditorium. I really had no complaints about the plot, although at times I sensed a brief disorientation based on the fact that I had not seen the other two movies. But this sensation was fleeting. All in all, the movie stood on its own well enough, and made me look forward to seeing the others in the series.