What Parents Need to Know
Parents need to know that this film features incessant, stylized, and graphic violence. Modes of death and injury include decapitation, disembowelment, dismemberment, piercing, crossbowing, impaling, chopping, and shooting, as well as slamming with trucks and jeeps, massive fiery explosions, biting and ripping with fangs, digging into chest cavities, and penetrating limbs, torsos, and heads with spearlike wingtips. Motivations include vengeance and power-madness. Selene uses a truck to slam a vampire into a mountainside repeatedly, a chopper with whirring blades serves to splatter a villain excessively. A sex scene features slow motion naked bodies in softlit profile. Some drinking in a tavern, some blood-drinking in a wineglass, smoking in the background of a couple of scenes; one scene features explicit vomiting. Characters curse occasionally ("hell," s-word, and f-word, one rendered in subtitle).
- Families can talk about the film's representation of race differences. If the vampires and lycans are descended from the same father, as revealed in this film's mythology, their centuries-long battle seems especially tragic and futile. How might the hybrid characters -- both the werewolf/vampire mix Michael and the new breed Selene becomes -- hold a hope for a future not premised on race-warring? And how does the franchise simultaneously depend on fight imagery: blood, body parts, stomach-churning violence?