Nearest he got to china was a week in Camber Sands

Each Day, A Film:
January 31st 2012

Bonus round! Let's finish off January's entries - especially since we're five days away from the end of February - with a little more Milla Jovovich.



Now, at least, we're shifting from zombies to vampires - well, wait, kind of vampires, but not necessarily really vampires, just hemolytic - no, you know what, I'm not going to try to justify this at all.

If that sounds negative, bear in mind that I love Ultraviolet.

Now, if you watched the trailer, do me a favour and go back and watch it again. Notice both the distinctive music choices and the use of GRAVELLY VOICED TRAILER MAN.

The first is interesting to me because of a concept I was introduced to back in the day; intertextuality. Now, it's not a concept I claim to fully understand, but the understanding I have of it is that if you're reading one book and something specific makes you think of a second book, there's probably a good reason for that, and it's maybe even intentional on the part of the author.

In the case of films, this can be either even more subtle or even more blatant, but the music at the start of the above trailer - Clubbed to Death by Rob Dougan - has massive intertextual power for me because the last time I heard it used (or, at least, used properly) was in The Matrix. Now, obviosuly, that carries a lot of connotations, because, love it or loathe it, The Matrix was a pivotal film.

Ultraviolet is not The Matrix, but it is very impressive, visual-effects wise.

I will freely admit that my entry on Equilibrium was cut short, for various reasons. But a fun thing to do is to treat Ultraviolent as an evolution, or even a sequel, to Equilibrium, and not just because they're both directed by Kurt Wimmer.

At the end of Equilibrium, the masses are freed from their emotionally-numb state, and it's equally likely that while romance, culture and art are going to return, there's also going to be a whole lot of war.

So it's not a stretch to imagine that the same government scientists who thought "Tell you what, let's eliminate emotions with mood stabilisers" could have thought "Tell you what, let's genetically engineer soldiers to put down the rebellion". The same themes are there; oppressive government, super-soldiers, rebellion against authority, but at the same time, Christian Bale couldn't ride his motorcycle across a building.

Ultraviolet is glorious, in that respect, because instead of going with Gun-Kata - which, although impressive, kind of falls down in the face of automatic weapons wielded by anyone with any degree of skill, although that rules out both rebels and mook guards in the Equilibrium universe - Ultraviolet just runs with it. All the absurdity, all the over-the-top, everything; Ultraviolet doesn't care, as long as it's cool. Which is refreshingly honest, really. Oh, there's ropey scientific justificaiton about what's going on, but most of the time it looks like none of the actors trying to give any kind of exposition could actually take it seriously, because oh look there's someone in glass armour! Let's go smash it!

I'm not going to try to defend the film - it's physically, not to mention psychologically - impossible - but at the same time, there's a kind of charm to watching mostly well-staged kinetic cinematic action sequences unfold, and that's never necessarily a bad thing to watch a film for.