Buy it... if a hybrid of Paul Haslinger's original, heavily metallic sound for the Underworld franchise and his more conventional orchestral and choral approach to The Three Musketeers is acceptable despite its anonymity.

Avoid it... if you're still waiting to hear Haslinger reprise the brash attitude of his first score for the concept or develop even some marginally cohesive thematic narrative for the whole series.

Haslinger

Underworld: Awakening: (Paul Haslinger) As long as each of its successive, brainless entries keeps making money, why put a merciful end to the Underworld franchise? Surely there has to be something more redeeming in this concept than simply seeing a hot brunette in a black leather outfit kicking godless ass. Or is there? That tool of hotness is once again Kate Beckinsale in the fourth movie of this series, Underworld: Awakening. She has evolved into a hybrid vampire that is impervious to sunlight and telepathically connected to her lover and daughter. In the twelve years during which she was imprisoned in cryogenic suspension, humanity had decided that it had endured enough of this vampire and lycan nonsense. When not annihilating the "non-humans," men used a company called Antigen to work on a cure for these groups of nasty community-wreckers. To the dismay of the vampires, however, it turns out that this creepy company is actually controlled by the lycans, who are using its research to make themselves more physically powerful. The daughter of Beckinsale's character, Selene, contains the genetic key to mastering all of these evolutionary changes, and her mother has to rescue her, fight off a new troll-like lycan, and conduct an ass-whooping of immense property destruction to help free her lover and save her suffering people. Unlike the previous Underworld movies, which contained at least a greater dose of existential and interpersonal intrigue, Underworld: Awakening is a more conventional action flick. Its production style hasn't changed significantly, blue hues still dominant and a nasty metallic edge to much of its sound effects and music. Handling the first and third scores in the franchise was industrial metal composer Paul Haslinger, and it's refreshing to see the artist continue his affiliation with the franchise for which he established the musical direction. His score for the original entry was an extremely abrasive but appropriately pounding balance of ball-busting rhythmic force and vaguely troubled tonal resonance, including the franchise's one and only love theme of note. After a decent diversion to Marco Beltrami for Underworld Evolution in 2006, Haslinger returned to provide more conventional, streamlined music for Underworld: Rise of the Lycans in 2009, and that trend away from the composer's metal roots continues with the increasingly orchestral stance of his music in Underworld: Awakening.

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The basic foundation of Haslinger's music for the original Underworld endures in this fourth movie in the franchise, but its trademark instrumentation is tempered by orchestral techniques that reside far closer to current blockbuster convention. Grating metallic effects, thrashing percussion, dominant bass tones, and whining electric guitars are still active players in Underworld: Awakening, but their impact has been diminished by the greater role of an orchestra and choir. With his approach to The Three Musketeers in 2011, Haslinger confirmed that he was, by choice or necessity, steering his career towards the sound made famous by Hans Zimmer and his Remote Control production house. Thus, you hear him providing muscular string ostinatos for vampires and lycans while exploring melodramatic tonality for the sensitive character scenes. His execution of these techniques is rather simplistic, reflecting The Three Musketeers in its relative lack of sophistication and sounding like a clone of Trevor Rabin (but without that composer's knack for catchy themes). In an ambient sense, Haslinger earned his pay with Underworld: Awakening, handling each facet of the score with appropriately brutal or sad tones. The "Main Titles" and "Find Her and Destroy Her" are typical RC marches of rhythmic bravado. The piano loneliness of the prior scores' slower moments returns in "This is Not One of Us" and "You Came Back," the latter a Mark Snow-like cue. The best moments in the score, ironically, are those in which Haslinger reprises the ugliest mayhem from the first score, the pair of "The Uber-Lycan" and "A New Dawn" finally tapping that original, raw energy of a mostly synthetic nature. But the problem that has plagued these scores from the very start has been cohesion, and Underworld: Awakening once again meanders along without forming any kind of narrative arc. There are no prominent themes once again, the popular use of "Eternity and a Day" as the love theme in the first score only suggested briefly in "The Melancholy of Resistance" (with subtle female voice mixed periodically in the cue for single notes) and the primary theme from Underworld still largely absent from the sequels despite the direct line of narrative in the stories. Like Underworld: Rise of the Lycans, Haslinger teases listeners with passages that almost combine his uniquely electronic mannerisms with the RC sound in an ultimate hybrid mixture (which would seem appropriate, given the plot of these movies), but he never follows that path. A score-only album with three compatible songs at the end may be a guilty pleasure for some, but it doesn't advance the franchise's music in any coherent direction. **   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download