Underworld Awakening (2012): Cast, Plot and Ending Explained

The full plot runs from the Purge to a raid on a corporate tower, and it ends with Michael missing again.

Six months after the earlier film, the public learns that vampires and Lycans exist. A human program to study them becomes the Purge, and Selene and Michael are caught in it. Selene goes into cryogenic suspension, and about twelve years later she breaks out of the facility and takes a young girl with her. The girl is her hybrid daughter, Eve.

A vampire named David takes the pair to his coven. The Lycans attack that coven, and Selene fights a huge Super Lycan called Quint. David is badly wounded, and Selene saves him with her blood. It then emerges that David's father, Thomas, had handed Eve to the Lycans in an attempt to stop the attack.

Selene and Detective Sebastian (Michael Ealy) trace the Lycans to Antigen, a company run by Lycans posing as humans. Its head, Dr. Jacob Lane (Stephen Rea), wants Eve's DNA to strengthen the Lycan race. Selene, Sebastian and David raid the Antigen building, and inside Selene finds Michael in a cryogenic tank and frees him.

She has to leave him as he thaws, because the Lycans are about to take Eve. Selene lures Quint into his weaker human form and kills him with a silver grenade, and Eve kills Lane. When the group goes back to Michael's tank, it is empty.

The ending of Underworld: Awakening resolves the fight over Eve and leaves Michael as the open question.

Selene kills the Super Lycan Quint by tricking him into reverting to his human form, then using a silver grenade. Eve kills Dr. Lane, which ends the immediate threat to her. The group returns to the tank where Selene left Michael, and it is empty. They vow to find him before anyone else does.

Why does the Quint kill work? In my opinion, it is the cleanest use of the series' creature rules in the film. Quint is a huge Super Lycan, so Selene wins by forcing him back into his weaker human form and finishing him with a silver grenade. It is a small piece of logic, and it pays off the earlier fight with Quint at David's coven, where David is badly wounded.

Why is the tank empty? The film leaves it unexplained and uses it to set up a search for Michael in a sequel. It could be argued that the choice also makes the middle of the film feel thin, because Michael is found and lost within a few scenes after a long build up. Perhaps that is the cost of a story that wants Selene, as a mother, to choose Eve over Michael in the moment.

Did the sequel pay it off? Sony's distribution chief Rory Bruer told TheWrap he would be surprised if there were no fifth film, and underworld blood wars followed. It brings back David and Thomas, and its setup has the Lycan leader Marius wanting Selene's help finding Eve. For the long view, see the underworld timeline and the corvinus bloodline explainer.