“Underworld: Awakening” or and….?

At 88 minutes “Underworld: Awakening” is rather underdeveloped.  I am not really sure why the makers of this film decided to go with such a short time.  There seems to be a lot of the story left out, and the character development just isn’t there, why didn’t they use the extra half hour to build the plot and the characters? WHY? WHY? 

Ok, seriously though, the newly added character, Selene’s daughter, is brought in with a sort of Ta Da!! flourish, but then they do next to nothing with her.  At one point Selene says “she has to be protected, she is more powerful than all of us.” Really how does she know? The little girl hasn’t done anything, in fact she doesn’t do much through out the whole movie, they don’t even give her a name.  She turns blue a couple of times but that is it.

Michael doesn’t even get any dialogue, except to say “we’ll leave when she gets here”.  Then he’s done, for the whole movie.

Admittedly I love Selene’s character, she has always been my favorite.  And I did enjoy the movie in a shallow way.  Watching Selene kick ass is always worthwhile.  But the story development just isn’t there.  There are even new character’s added to the story, i.e. the vampires living underground, led by a random elder.  But nothing about them is explained; who is the elder? are they all that are left? how do they survive? The movie doesn’t even try to explain anything about them.

At one point Selene’s daughter calls her cold, though even that is not demonstrated.  Apparently she is cold, because she hasn’t hugged her daughter or something?  However, at that point they have been running from the powers that be non-stop, so when should she have stopped that to have a tender moment, I don’t know. 

All of that said, I did enjoy the show in a very superficial way, but I was left wondering about way too much.