The Violet that is Ultra
I had the chance to see Ultraviolet the other night.
It was a movie I had wanted to see for a while based on the cool looking trailer. If you give that a watch, you’ll glean the basic premise; Orwellian society split in two between infectees of a genetically-engineered supervirus and the so-called “normal people”.
Apparently - and this is something I failed to pick up - this virus makes you a vampire. Now don’t worry if you missed that part. The word “vampire” is used maybe 4 times during the movie. Vocabulary aside, nothing even remotely vampire-like happens at all. Which I loved. Director and (clearly talented) Writer Kurt Wimmer has finally gotten away from that age-old stereotype that vampires are concerned with blood and the sucking thereof. Thanks for that, Kurt. Instead he shows us a world where “vampire” quite literally means you just become really skilled in martial arts and then abruptly die.
No, seriously. I don’t get it.
On the topic of language, let me give some examples of Kurt’s almost enchanted wordsmithing. There’s a subgroup who you’re introduced to (for about 30 seconds. honestly.) who are in this strange limbo between human and vampire. Oh no - they’re Blood Chinois. I have a number of Canadians (god bless them) on my list, so it’s pretty much legally decreed that they realise “Blood Chinois” just means Chinese Blood. Exciting.
Let’s get away from zany, logically bereft premises, because it’s frankly not befitting for a hyper-stylized action movie. Let’s talk about crazy technology, because that’s the fun part.
The movie certainly isn’t lacking in them, which is good(?). Among them are a gravity-altering belt, uzis with swords in them, and technology which allows you to store things in 4-Dimensional Space (what???).
Normally, in most action movies, this crazy technology only serves to make the action much more badass. I imagine it would, too, if it wasn’t ruined by the absolute worst aspect of the movie:
Visual effects.
Now I’m no expert. I haven’t even figured out how to make a square in Maya. But the effects were quite simply bad. Nearly every shot in the film was clearly trying to go for the soft-focus 1930’s-type effect, but they were just out of focus. The effects weren’t even stylistically low-tech. They were low-budget low-tech. Most of them came off poorly or not at all. I had a lot of trouble following the action a lot of the time.
For about half the movie, I was staring at the screen in a mixture of disbelief and horror. The other half, I was laughing hysterically.
Quite simply put, it’s a movie everyone needs to go see because it is so fucking terrible in every way.