Ultraviolet (2006): 20th Anniversary Retrospective (Part 1)

 

Ultraviolet (2006): 20^th Anniversary Retrospective - Part One

I remember seeing the poster for Ultraviolet for the first time at my local video store. I was twelve, going on thirteen, and had already seen a trailer for the film, but this was upon its DVD release, back when that kind of thing was a big deal. The poster featured the most striking, gorgeous woman I had ever seen. I had to have it. The video store owner had kindly given me their 27 x 40 print of Peter Jackson’s King Kong the year before, and were kind enough yet again to give me the Ultraviolet poster, which went up on my wall and remained there for well over a decade. I rented the movie not long after it came out, watched it, and instantly fell in love with not only Milla Jovovich, but the whole film, which was unlike anything I had ever seen before.

Ultraviolet turns twenty years old this year, with today being the anniversary of the home video release. If you’ve never heard of it, or forgot it existed, don’t worry, so did the rest of the world, and many tried to forget about it on purpose, including Jovovich herself and Kurt Wimmer, who wrote and directed this original sci-fi/action/adventure. Ultraviolet, despite a pretty sick trailer full of action shots paced to the banger song “24” by Jem, was a box office bomb, making just a million dollars more than its 30-million-dollar budget. It has a horrendous 9 % rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and both Jovovich and Wimmer have disowned the version of the film that was released, claiming the studio interfered. Is this movie a forgettable piece of trash, or is it an overlooked gem? To me, it’s not exactly either, but something even more curious.

When my best friend first saw the poster, he recognized the star of Ultraviolet as “that girl from Resident Evil” which I had not seen yet, but back in the early 2000s, Kurt Wimmer had seen Milla Jovovich in action and written Ultraviolet specifically with her in mind. Screen Gems, the subsidiary that distributed the Resident Evil films from that era, was also behind Ultraviolet. It’s a bit surprising to me that Screen Gems put out six Resident Evil films, which Jovovich continued to return for (largely because her future husband Paul W.S. Anderson was the creative force behind them from the start, the two of them having met on the set of the first film), but she disowned Ultraviolet because the same studio locked her out of the editing room prior to its release. Kurt Wimmer claims the theatrical version was not his original vision, and I do believe him.

Before I get into what this movie is actually about, and how I’m sure both Wimmer and Jovovich were imagining a version of this film that was much better than the final product, I am reflecting on the unrated version here, which is unquestionably better than the theatrical cut, despite running only six minutes longer. It’s the version I bought on DVD after having rented it for the first time, and unfortunately, there is no North American release of this unrated version on any other home video format, nor is it on streaming, only the theatrical version can be found in HD. When I discovered what the theatrical version doesn’t include, it made even more sense to me why audiences initially balked at it, because it’s even more nonsensical.

Ultraviolet begins with extremely cool opening titles that are in the style of comic book artwork and lettering, the words cheekily dissolving or morphing from comic headlines or dialogue into the credits over issues of comics I wish actually existed. Immediately, it’s a reminder that Ultraviolet, despite being an original concept, was made to fit in with the advent of the comic book movie craze. This was the same year as X-Men: The Last Stand, Superman Returns, and Zack Snyder's 300. I’ve always liked the opening credit music, but just in my most recent rewatch, realized why it sounds so familiar: it rips off Danny Elfman’s Spider-Man theme! Composer Klaus Badelt collaborated with Hans Zimmer three years earlier to give us the memorable Pirates of the Caribbean score, and aside from this derivative opening track, I still enjoy Badelt’s Ultraviolet score. He previously worked with Wimmer on his 2002 film Equilibrium, a film which shares some similar narrative themes, but is really a whole other beast.

Violet Song Jat Shariff was, in her words, “born into a world you may not understand” and we get a glimpse of this unforgiving dystopia before a rapid recap of the events that led to this violent future through narration by Jovovich as Violet. If only the Covid-19 pandemic had been as cool as the hemophage pandemic! A lab “accident” resulted in the spread of a virus that mutates human DNA, turning people into super-soldier-quality beings who just so happen to grow longer canines, which almost makes Ultraviolet a vampire movie, but not quite. While "hemophages" are sensitive to sunlight and have pointy teeth and are super strong, they don’t drink blood, and more importantly, don’t live as long. Humans cast them out, so they’ve become an underground organization trying to overthrow the tyranny of the ArchMinistry, a centralized fascist government led by Vice Cardinal Ferdinand Daxus (Nick Chinlund).

The backstory for Violet includes the loss of her husband, the unwanted termination of her pregnancy, and repeated experimentation, then when we meet her in the present after this somewhat hectic, clumsy, and confusing worldbuilding setup, she’s on a mission to steal a superweapon from the ArchMinistry, which turns out to be a child—a young boy named Six (Cameron Bright), and she makes a decision (well informed by the setup for her character, I think) that paints a target on her back for both the military forces led by Daxus and her fellow hemophages to zero in on. She gets some help from an old friend, Garth (William Fichtner), but it’s up to her to protect Six and unravel the mystery of the weapon within him that could either end “the blood wars” or lead to the extinction of humans and hemophages alike.

I’m not over here fending off the haters with a sword, nor am I dumping all over its shortcomings; I’m both in defense of Ultraviolet’s overlooked positive aspects and critical of its many flaws it has been so rightfully lambasted for. This is no ordinary movie review; this is a full-on retrospective, because I find not only the behind-the-scenes story of Ultraviolet interesting, but the actual film itself polarizing, with plenty to love and plenty to loathe. I’ll be back next time to review both aspects, as well as the fundamental flaws in what could have been a genre-defining sci-fi/action epic.