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Ultraviolet
Better than Aeon Flux, but...
2006
Review: March 16, 2006
Director: Kurt Wimmer
Starring: Milla Janovich, Cameron bright, Nick Chinlund, William Fichtner
Probably the only way to get through.
THE SETUP:
A bunch of people have a lot of fights in a dystopian future for some reason or other.
DISCUSSION:
Here in New York posters went up for this all over the place, even though I’d heard nothing about it. Somehow you could tell just by looking at it that vampires are going to be involved. It looked like another Buffy-Aeon Flux-Matrix-Night Watch thing… and it was! Only the closest comparison is to Aeon Flux.
The best thing I can say about this movie is that it’s better than Aeon Flux. Other than that the similarities are quite remarkable. In this one Milla Janovich [a lot more awesome than Charlize Theron in these kinds of roles] is a hemophage, essentially a vampire, who is kind of a terrorist who strikes back at the government because she’s pissed about the way that “society” treats the hemophages. She also lost an unborn child, removed by the government in order to give her a mommy complex and maternal feelings for whatever young boys/biological weapons she may encounter.
So she drives her motorcycle and arrives at this place to pick up a package and this leads to a long series of fights and chases. By this time you have noticed that the CGI backgrounds here are approximately at video game quality, as are most of the effects. I am usually all for the “let’s have cheap effects but a TON of them” approach, but although there’s a lot of detail here, there’s not enough story. Then she looks inside the case, although she specifically said she wouldn’t [next she TOTALLY needs to go up against The Transporter, who also has trouble not peeking in his forbidden cases], and it turns out to be the creepy child from Birth, who was apparently transported into the future after fucking up Nicole Kidman’s marriage. He’s got some bullshit in his blood that’ll either kill everyone or save everyone or something or other, but he’s real important. And his presence necessitates a lot of fights.
These fights are mostly the same, and mostly stuff we’ve seen before. One woman goes up against any number of guys and kills them all. What remarkable here is that Milla’s character uses a different technique in almost every fight, and she manages to have different kind of opponents in each one. There are the guards who apparently armor themselves with shattered glass packed in flour, this Asian mafia who are so dumb all you have to do is stand aside and let them shoot each other, it goes on. At one point Milla is fighting about 15 guys who are all supposed to be as strong as she is [they’re also vampires], and all we see is all of them falling backward, with no explanation of how she accomplished this. The fights get dull and simultaneously all the same and stupidly different [how many different kinds of guards do the bad guys have?], and after a while you’ve given up on any emotional investment and are waiting for it to end. In a last, desperate ploy to make the final fight somehow different than the others preceding, they fight in the dark, with flaming swords.
In the meantime, there’s clothes and hair that change color, a building shaped like a biohazard symbol, another building shaped like a crucifix, and a lot more crucifix imagery. Toward the end we repeatedly see a highway running through… what are those things? Like bales of hay? Canisters of garbage? Milla, for a vampire, is also on a rather strict diet, as we never see her eat anyone or even want to. She also seems to have no trouble walking around in daylight, though I think this was given a cursory explanation at some point. There’s also a point at which Milla dies for a while, and we’re in a vision, only you can’t tell, and my and my friend, both tragically and completely sober, looked at each other like ‘what the FUCK?’ Then she was revived and we realized that she was dead. Oh.
Milla is cool. If I was straight I’d think she was hot, and you certainly get a ton of Milla-ab here, though not much else. She’s also good because she throws herself into this shit whole-hog, and doesn’t seem embarrassed the way Charlize did. After the two Resident Evil movies, which I enjoyed, and this, she’s turning into the sci-fi babe to beat. My friend even wondered what it would have been like if she had been Trinity in The Matrix. But anyway, she’s fabulous, and she's really the only reason to sit through this.
Kurt Wimmer’s last movie, Equilibrium, had similar issues, but was ultimately compelling. It also took place in a dystopian future, featured new and stupid methods of fighting, and had wayyy too much story to cram into its running time, while simultaneously having long stretches when you feel like nothing is happening. Still, that’s only a partial waste of time, while this is a total waste of time.
SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?
I wouldn’t, unless you want to oogle Milla’s abs and have no other hopes or expectations from this movie.
