This blog post is part of the Agora Road Travelogue for July 2025

It kinda amuses me how long did it take for me to watch Underworld. Just as with Resident Evil, I bought the DVD in order to watch it, and just like with Resident Evil, I’m baffled by how much I abided to law back then. I know I planned to watch it, but somehow it never happened.

I must say that the premise of the film was very appealing to me. I am a sucker for vampires for some mental gymnastics whose detail I have completely forgotten and can only attest have something to do with the web game diep.io. Dracula, the original novel by Bram Stoker, is one of my all time favorites, and I really like to dissect how much vampire-related media follow the strict rules set by it.

As for the movie setting, it is goth alright. It kinda looks like an Evanescence music video. The coloring reminds me of that of The Crow, another movie I have to revisit soon. I kinda like what they did with the vampires being somewhat aristocratic while the werewolves are more like the underclass. They play this dynamic quite well in the film and makes it very on par with other portrayals of vampires in media. Although I find it hilarious that the vampires are inherently British. Given that there is no Dracula for werewolves, it is often left to the imagination of the creator how they want to portray them, and I think that this, how would I call it, Metropolis with monsters plays quite nicely.

The action scenes is where I find the movie kind of lacking. There is a lot of gunfights and some close combat, but it really makes you wonder, given the amount of bullets flying on the screen, if the movie really needed to be about vampires and werewolves and couldn’t be a more blatant rip-off of The Matrix, which it clearly tries to be. As such, there’s a lot of latex and leather, which quite frankly makes for some killer outfits, but you would have to be an undead in order to wear them without sweating while in a fight.

The love triangle, plot twist and final battle are not particularly remarkable. So I would recommend the film only if you are really into goth aesthetics, to which it contributes nicely. As I said, it plays like an Evanescence music video. I haven’t watch Twilight, but I guess it is a more manly alternative to it.