The 2006 Post-Apocalyptic Action Thriller Ultraviolet is a Wildly Derivative Combination of Stylish and Stupid
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It’s curious how you can be deeply nostalgic for things that are objectively terrible and that you rightly despised the first time around. For example there will always be a soft spot in my heart for low-budget yet star-studded direct-to-video Tarantino knockoffs because those were the kinds of movies I wrote about when I began freelancing for The A.V. Club back in the late nineteen nineties and the world radiated infinite promise.
I similarly sometimes find myself pining for that weird period when it sure felt like Will.I.Am produced and contributed guest vocals for roughly forty percent of the songs in the Top 40. And I HATE Will.I.Am!
Or at least I did when the Black Eyed Peas frontman was hugely popular. Now that he’s receded culturally my dumb brain can’t help but wonder if I didn’t gave him a fair chance and that perhaps my fierce conviction that EVERYTHING he did was insultingly terrible might not have been completely correct.
A few days ago I found myself feeling vaguely nostalgic for the time when The Matrix’s groundbreaking success led to a flurry of anemic imitators who shamelessly aped the film’s visual style without understanding or appreciating the ideas and humanity behind the film’s zeitgeist-capturing success.
2006’s Ultraviolet hit theaters seven years after The Matrix dramatically expanded the stylistic vocabulary of action movies but it is still in thrall to the film’s signature “Bullet Time” technique and slow-motion.
Writer-director Kurt Wimmer’s brain dead science fiction thriller is even more derivative of the Resident Evil and Underworld franchises, to the point where my brain, which we have already established is deficient, lumps them in with the more successful movies.
There are crucial differences, however. In the Resident Evil movies Milla Jovovich plays a martial arts adept badass in a post-apocalyptic world where a deadly virus transforms people into zombie-like creatures. In Ultraviolet, however, Jovovich plays a martial arts-adept badass in a post-apocalyptic world where a deadly virus has transformed the masses into fanged, vampire-like creatures known as hemophages who are stronger and faster than humans but have very short life spans.
Humans are at war with hemophages, who have formed an underground resistance. Jovovich plays Violet Song Jat Shariff. Violet was once human but then she was infected and became a super-soldier with superhuman skills that essentially make her a superhero.
In Ultraviolet the masses wear masks to protect them from a virus that has forever changed the way people live for worse. COVID consequently has lent this profoundly stupid spectacle an unearned element of timeliness, even prescience.
Wimmer previously wrote and directed the cult science fiction thriller Equilibrium, which trafficked extensively in Gun Fu, a form of fighting that combines guns and hand to hand combat. Like so many action innovations, Gun Fu was perfected in Hong Kong, then brought to the States in movies like The Matrix and Equilibrium for a very good reason: it looks cool.
Wimmer’s signature move as a filmmaker is for one of his scowling, stoic badasses to enter a blindingly empty room full of dozens of poorly differentiated henchmen and then use their incredible Gun Fu skills to make quick work of sixty or seventy anonymous bad guys through a combination of gunplay and lightning-fast moves.
Violet is just one mutated super-woman but she regularly defeats small armies of bad guys without breaking a sweat. From an aesthetic standpoint, there’s something deeply satisfying about this methodically choreographed nonsense. It appeals to the kid in all of us who favors mindless spectacle over coherence.
But our super-heroine’s seeming invulnerability also eliminates any element of danger or suspense. Violet is like the Harlem Globetrotters of post-apocalyptic fighting: there is zero chance that she’ll ever lose. So the fun comes in seeing just how easily and thoroughly she will humiliate the opponents.
Violet uses her skills to swagger defiantly into enemy territory and risk detection, imprisonment or execution in order to purloin a valuable bio-weapon with the power to destroy hemophages. She’s shocked to open the weapon’s case and discover that the bio-weapon is Six (Cameron Bright), a spooky little boy who earned his name by virtue of being the sixth clone of Vice-Cardinal Ferdinand Daxus (Nick Chinlund), an evil apocalyptic overlord with a dark secret.
Violet is supposed to deliver Six to her fellow hemophages but is torn between a sense of duty and growing maternal feelings towards Six. The vulnerable young clone brings out the emotional side in Violet, reconnecting her with the woman she used to be.
My vague memory of Equilibrium is that it was astonishingly, almost impressively idiotic but also very stylish and fun. That’s true of Ultraviolet as well but it is, if anything, dumber than Equilibrium and not as much fun.
Ultraviolet is at least bold and unashamed in its trashiness. It’s the kind of kooky b-movie where the heroine drives UP a building and THROUGH a helicopter and then to a nearby skyscraper. You’re not going to see that in The Shawshank Redemption, unless there’s an extended cut I don’t know about.
Ultraviolet is gloriously, embarrassingly a product of its time. It takes place in the distant future yet low-rise leather trousers have somehow managed to stay in fashion. Jovovich’s bare midriff is consequently the film’s primary visual motif. In the grand tradition of female-led action movies, Ultraviolet relentlessly sexualizes its heroine by putting her in the tightest, most revealing costumes possible while also portraying her as a more or less unstoppable killing machine.
Ultraviolet is aggressively artificial in a Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow/300 kind of way. Green screens aren’t just a tool at its disposal; it’s pretty much the film’s entire aesthetic. Ultraviolet inhabits a world of pixels and ones and zero where everything is a shiny simulacrum and nothing is recognizably human.
Wimmer’s flop puzzlingly focuses on vampires of the future strangely devoid of any vampiric qualities other than fangs. William Fichtner pops up as a Vampire Scientist From the Future with fangs and everything to consult with Violet. Fichtner does a professional job as always but he’s nowhere as much fun as he should be, considering, again, that WILLIAM FICHTNER PLAYS A VAMPIRE SCIENTIST IN THE FUTURE.
I suspect that Ultraviolet was clearly designed to be a franchise starter but that was not to be. That’s no great loss, as there are LOTS of movies JUST like this but better, most notably Equilibrium, which is the perfect entry point if you want to explore the trashy universe of a deeply unimportant filmmaker.
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