Ultraviolet

Written 5 March 2006

Warning: This film review reveals most of the plot of the movie.

I saw the trailer for this movie at the start of Aeon Flux (a really horrible movie, by the way). The preview looked awesome, describing a group of super beings created to fight a war. Once the war was over, these beings had no purpose anymore (in fact they were dangerous to society) and were viciously destroyed until there were just a few left.

Well, something changed between when I saw that preview and the release of this movie. The plot was changed, or the trailer had nothing to do with the plot in the first place. This new movie is not about a race of super soldiers - it's about a disease which turns people into something else. It's clear this film has trouble deciding exactly what this disease does - and it flip-flops back and forth as to the effects of this plague.

Okay, the movie begins with a fantastic scene of a plane dropping half a dozen soldiers, protected by a spherical covering, into a building. It's obviously a raid by special forces of some kind. This turns out to be a trap, and the soldiers are all killed mercilessly.

Next, a woman rides up on a motorcycle. This is Violet, played Milla Jovovich (one of the most gorgeous women in the world), and she's a Hemophage, which is what someone who is infected with this disease becomes. However, she's done something to herself so that her disease does not show up on several very high-tech scans of her body down to the DNA level. I absolutely love the ways they've made her hair change colors (computer graphics are so cool sometimes). If someone figured out how to do this and sell it as a product, they'd make a fortune.

Violet is masquerading as a courier to pick up a weapon which is intended to be used to finish the fight against the hemophages once and for all. She penetrates the security of the building, but alarms go off before she can get out and, well, all hell breaks loose.

This fight scene that occurs between Violet and hundreds of guards is awesome to behold, as are most of the fight scenes in this movie. The chase scene that follows, cars and helicopters verses one woman on a motorcycle, are another thing entirely. Violet has some kind of vaguely described "gravity well" thingy and it allows her motorcycle to climb up the sides of buildings and such. No one seems much surprised by this (perhaps it happens all the time), and it doesn't even give Violet any advantage in the chase. I must point out here that the CGI (computer graphics) during this chase are terrible - on the level of Tron. The chase is completely unbelievable, overdone and just stupid.

I'm not going to get into the rest of the plot in this little review. The plot really doesn't make much sense. It's pretty obvious, at least to me, that someone wrote a really good story and it was changed in mid-filming into something else. You can see the good story here and there, as when Violet is challenged by other hemophages, but it has been changed into a senseless, pointless, downright idiotic piece of junk.

About half-way through the movie, hemophages become vampires. This little fact is not mentioned until about an hour into the film, when one of them smiles and you see the pointy teeth. I groaned out loud when I saw this, it was so out of place.  You see, up until that point, they're hemophages. After that, they are vampires.

Part of the plot revolves around a little boy named six. As it turns out, he is a clone of the evil overlord of this place, and he's been infected with something. Somehow, and it's very unclear how this happened, Violet gets the idea that this little boy has the cure for the disease. Thus, the small case that Violet gets at the start of the movie which contains a deadly weapon to end the insurrection of the hemophages somehow becomes a little clone boy who has the cure for the disease. Yet he doesn't. Then he does. But wait, it's not a cure after all. Or is it?

One question I have to ask is why do all of these futuristic, comic-based movies have so much sword fighting? I mean, modern armies do not use swords at all, anywhere, for good reason. They are useless in a battle involving long range weapons such as guns. It does not matter how good a person is with a sword, he's going to lose to a simple shotgun just about every time. Yet even though this film as some very high-tech, powerful, futuristic guns, the guards still use swords, Violet uses swords and everyone seems to know how to swordfight. Yeah, it looks great, but it's just plain dumb.

I rated this movie a "C" overall for a few reasons. Yes, the plot is only slightly above the horrid Aeon Flux. Sure, the acting is pretty bad and the script is schizophrenic and downright moronic. Okay, I'll admit the movie makes absolutely no sense from the special forces raid at the beginning to the dome blowing up at the end.

But it is worth the price of admission just to see Milla Jovovich. She's beautiful, and the action scenes of her fighting are just fantastic. I love the guns that she has packed somewhere, in inter-dimensional space perhaps, perhaps, that she can just materialize out of nowhere. The swordplay is extremely well done and some of the effects are fantastic.

I'd like to have had a fast-forward button while watching this film to skip all of the lame attempts at a story and just watch the action scenes. Everything else is simply stupid.