Underworld: Evolution is a 2006 action horror film and the sequel to the 2003 film Underworld.
Plot[]
In 1202, a vampire army led by elders Viktor, Amelia and Markus arrive to a village decimated by werewolves and begin burning the bodies. The victims begin transforming into werewolves and a battle ensues. The vampires manage to kill the werewolves and one of them, which is revealed to be Markus’ twin brother, William. Viktor threatens to have William killed, but Markus warns him of what will happen if he does so, so Viktor instead has William imprisoned and beyond Markus’ reach.
In the present, Selene and Michael travel to a vampire safe house outside the city with sunlight hours away. Selene hopes that Markus, the last elder of the coven, will hear from her what has transpired during his slumber and allow Michael to live, before Kraven, who escaped the lycan den, gets to him and kill him, as he’s no match for Markus awake.
Kraven returns to the Old World Coven vampire mansion to slay Markus while he’s still in hibernation, but Markus has awakened and become a vampire-lycan hybrid with wings, dispatching Kraven’s men and killing Kraven; the blood memories he acquired from Singe, the lycan whose blood caused him to become a hybrid, showed Markus that Kraven’s treachery against the coven.
Michael, despite Selene’s insistence that he deal with his new dependence on blood due to being a hybrid between vampire and lycan, leaves the safe house and goes to a diner to eat there; according to Selene, normal food can be dangerous if vampires and lycans don’t manage their cravings to avoid attacking humans unnecessarily.
Selene, unable to return to the mansion due to the impending sunrise, returns to the safe house and finds Michael gone.
In another safe house, Markus uses his newly-acquired knowledge from Kraven to locate Selene at another safe house; because each safe house owned by the vampires is linked under a shared network, they can tell which ones are currently in use and able to locate the vampires using them.
Elsewhere, on a ship, some men report to a man in charge of them with their findings, and it’s revealed that they’re people in charge of cleaning up after the conflicts involving the vampires and lycans, keeping any people that may have witnessed unable to talk about what happened by removing all evidence of the carnage. Upon discovering that Amelia, Viktor and Lucian were among the dead collected, the man in charge asks if Markus was recovered from the battles, only to learn that he destroyed the vampire coven.
“It was never his coven,” says the man.
Back at the diner, Michael becomes sick and begins attacking other patrons until Selene rescues him and gives him her blood to manage his new dependency on it to help control himself better. After feeding, they are encountered by Markus. Selene tries to explain Viktor and Kraven’s actions and why their fates were necessary, only to learn that Markus isn’t interested in either vampire. In his words, “Kraven has already reaped the rewards for his own misdeeds, and Viktor deserved his fate many times over.”
Markus, however, is after Selene for something else, and attacks her and Michael, leading to a chase in a truck and Markus being injured by being run against a mountainside, injuring his wings, and Selene needing to hide from the approaching sunlight. Finding shelter from the sunlight, Markus sleeps and recovers; because of his years as a vampire and possibly not aware that his hybrid nature may protect him against ultraviolet radiation, he still believes he has to move during the nightly hours.
On the ship, Viktor’s body, along with Amelia and Lucian’s bodies, are examined by the mysterious man. He dissects Viktor and discovers a golden object that he had kept attached to his chest.
Later, when Selene awakens and looks at the necklace that Lucian had taken off Sonja after her murder by Viktor, pressing a button and triggering a memory where she had seen it before when she was a child. After Michael repairs a truck, they head to a vampire named Tanis that was exiled from the coven for writing “malicious lies”; as he was tasked with writing the history of the coven, it was possible that some of what he wrote was true. They come to to a building built into the mountainside that serves as Tanis’ prison during his exile, and are attacked by lycans present there and later two vampires that were with Tanis, whom they kill to reach him. It is revealed that while Tanis has indeed been exiled to his prison, he began trading with Lucian and the lycans in exchange for creature comforts and lycan bodyguards.
“I done only what was necessary to survive,” Tanis explains his reasons for providing the lycans with ultraviolet ammunition.
Markus, who has recovered, attacks a barns and feeds off a horse in a stable, replenishing his strength.
Tanis reveals that Viktor was not the first vampire as many were led to believe, and that Markus is the original vampire; towards the end of his life as a human, Viktor, while on his deathbed, was approached by Markus, who offered him and his soldiers immortality in exchange for his help in tracking down and eradicating the first werewolves created by his twin brother, William, who, unlike his brother, became a creature of pure destruction because he couldn’t return to human form after he was bitten by a wolf while Markus was bitten by a bat. With the aid of his turned minions, Viktor, Markus and Amelia were able to capture and/or exterminate the werewolves and capture William alive. The reason William was imprisoned was because Viktor was led to believe that if anything happened to either brother, all that followed after them would die with them, putting an end to the lycans Viktor enslaved years later. Tanis shows them a book detailing William’s prison, built by Selene’s father, and humans loyal to Alexander Corvinous, the father of the immortals, and learning that the necklace is a key to the prison and Selene’s memories of its location are the map that Markus needs to free William. He offers to tell them who could stop Markus in exchange for his freedom from exile, which Selene obliges.
Markus arrives to see Tanis, just as Selene and Michael leave to meet with Tanis’ contact, and Markus kills him to acquire his blood memories of whatever he didn’t tell him, and learns of where Selene and Michael are going.
Selene and Michael arrive at a dockyard and meet with the man in charge of the men running the ship, and learn that he is Alexander Convinous, still alive and having spent his years of immortality trying to keep the war between vampires and lycans contained from the human race, and that he is ashamed of his family legacy and what his sons have wrought upon the world. Also, no matter what they have done, he can’t bring himself to kill his sons.
Markus arrives, attacks and kills some of the cleaners and fights with Michael in his hybrid form, seemingly killing him by impaling him in his chest, and then extracts Selene’s blood, giving him the location of William’s prison. He later visits his father and tells him of his intention to release his brother from his prison and takes the second half of the key needed to release William before stabbing his father and leaving him for dead.
Selene recovers, but is unable to revive Michael, and is later brought to Alexander, who offers her his blood. When asked what she’ll become if she drinks it, he replies that she’ll become the future, and she drinks his blood, granting her more strength to face Markus. As she and the remaining cleaners depart to face Markus, Alexander activates a bomb and blows the ship up, killing himself.
Markus, using the key to William’s tomb, opens it and releases his brother, who nearly attacks him, but comes to his senses when he recognizes Markus; despite the centuries of separation and his own condition as a werewolf, Markus and William have shared a bond that was stronger than what befell them.
Selene and the cleaners arrive to the location, but William has already been released; all the cleaners have are ultraviolet ammunition to deal with Markus. While ultraviolet ammunition won’t kill William, Selene states they will slow him down some. Meanwhile, aboard the helicopter they used to get to William’s prison, Michael revives from his fatal impaling by Markus, indicating that as long as his nervous system and body is intact, a hybrid can regenerate from most injuries.
William attacks several of the cleaners, feeding off them and infecting them with his lycanthropy, his strain more virulent than the later generations, able to turn the recently deceased into werewolves (and according to Tanis, those turned couldn’t assume human form ever again), outnumbering and overpowering Selene and the remaining cleaners. But Michael returns and fights them while Selene face Markus. In the end, once Michael kills the infected cleaners, he kills William by tearing the top half of his head off.
Markus, enraged by the murder of his brother’s death, stabs Selene in the chest with one of his wing talons. But Selene recovers, breaks the talon off and impales Markus in his head. Following this, she pushes him into the propeller of the helicopter that was pulled down, killing the pilots, and dismembering Markus, killing him.
Dawn comes and Michael, returned to his human form, sees Selene withstanding the sunlight; taking Alexander's blood not only increased her strength to put her on par with Markus, but also removed her weakness to sunlight. With the lines between vampires and lycans now blurred, chaos and infighting are inevitable, but Selene, for the first time in centuries, is able to look into the light with hope.