Ultraviolet

The editor who cut the trailers for this movie ought to either win an Oscar for prevarication or be taken out back and shot immediately for having the ability to make a film seem like something that it is utterly and completely not.

Based on the trailers you’d think Ultraviolet was the story of a heroine with beyond belief techno and fighting skills going against some sort of fascist government in the name of an oppressed people or cause. The lone warrior against unbelievable odds. And in some ways that’s exactly what Ultraviolet is. What the trailers don’t tell you, however, is that the entire film hinges on Violet’s (Milla Jovovich, late of Resident Evil and Resident Evil: Apocalypse, who seems to be specializing in playing mutants) thwarted maternal instincts and the ability of a cloned child, 6 (Cameron Bright), to unite two variants of homo sapiens.

At some time in the future, a world we are told in voice over that we “probably won’t understand,” the government unleashes a deadly, mutated virus which is contagious enough to start the sort of panic that was a very real possibility in the early days of AIDS, complete with the public branding and then segregation into camps of those who had survived the virus and mutated into “hemophages” (hemo referring to blood; phage being a kind of virus which acts as a parasite of bacteria, infecting them and reproducing inside them…which in this movie’s lexicon seems to be a fancy way of saying vampires). Violet is one of the survivors of this virus which seems to grant super speed, enhanced reflexes, and varying degrees of light sensitivity after someone “converts.”

Confused yet? You should be. The plot of this film is actually the weakest element of an enervated chain of cinematic tricks.

Part Hong Kong cinema, part post-Matrix disutopia, and part classic underdog with a purpose film, the basic problem is that this movie can’t decide what it wants to be. Shot on HD Video and converted to celluloid for distribution, you’d be hard pressed to find the parts of this movie, including the actors, that haven’t been touched by some sort of computer manipulation. Visually the film wants to be the same sort of stylistic triumph that The Matrix proved to be. Unfortunately, it takes the gimmicks and tropes over the edge to the point of completely dehumanizing the players.

One interesting thing the film does do, though, is color scheming. Given that the bulk of this film was crewed by Chinese filmmakers, Violet’s environment sensing wardrobe and the various colors it takes on should probably be given more weight than I can give it in interpreting the film’s visual code. Another is the concept of “flat space” which allows hemophage warriors to store multiple weapons in a collapsible null space for retrieval at any time.

Those two things, though, aren’t enough to save this mess of a film. My advice: save your $9 USD.

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