Immediately, we abandon the slick confines the original’s city, mansions and underground settings for the (somewhat) blanket openness of Eastern Europe. The story picks up just where we left off as well, with Selene and Michael on the run from the aftermath of the mayhem before, including the (spoiler for the first film) slaying of Victor. I’m just about fully on board with Evolution delving deeper into the lore of the “Vampire-Lycan” war and appreciative that it ties a number of strings together, including our main vampire played by Kate Beckinsale all without feeling like story beats and characters are just done for the sake of being convenient or filler.
I mentioned in the previous film that there were very few (if any) human characters present, which has been rectified in Evolution. Rectified, because I need to see how our vampires and werewolves perform in the face of your average human, which helps craft this world’s reality against our own. There’s a scene early on where Michael is chased into the woods by a group of humans – as he resists the urge to feed on them – and Selene comes out to the rescue; we’re treated to some supernaturally wonderful powers of movement and abilities that – from the perspective of those humans and to an extent myself, the viewer – is truly terrifying. Those powers don’t show up when vampires are fighting other vampires because presumably, they’re being used all the time and the film is showing us the normalized action. It was a fun scene to watch and I wish there was more of that stuff in the film.
The other world building that goes on is fun: early on we see a cleanup/investigation crew dispatched in an attempt to unravel what happened in the first film’s events, and an amusing scene where a giant vampire bat learns how to use a computer by drinking the blood of another vampire. Quite handy indeed! One of the few things I remember upon seeing this over a decade ago was a steamy sex scene and am happy to report that the scene is still just as steamy, although their (that is, Selene and Michael) romance feels a bit empty. The film does deliver in a decent quality, gory action scenes, although some of the logic and reasoning of the characters and plot leave a little bit to be desired. I found myself chuckling quizzically every so often, but I guess that comes with the territory as Evolution attempts to layer on complexity via backstory, when the strength of the first film was very much on being straightforward and heavy on style.
2006
dir: Len Wiseman
106m