I watched War of the Worlds and Ultaviolet over the weekend. There were many things that I liked about War of the Worlds, and many things I did not like about Ultraviolet.
I enjoyed the fact that the main character of War of the Worlds was flawed. Perhaps a bit too much. On one hand, he wants to protect his kids. On the other, it really does seem like he is trying to get them to their mother so that he can dump them off.
Judging from how Berta reacted, she seemed to think that the gun was a sign of bad things to come. I’m not sure I felt that way. I think that in a situation where I don’t know what I’m going to have to do to survive, I’m certainly not going to leave the gun behind. Yet, I think the movie tried to enhance her feeling about the gun - in the scene where they enter the mother’s house and try to get rest in the basement, the camera seems to focus on him removing the gun from his belt. This seemed unnecessary to me, since the gun didn’t factor in that scene at all.
When it finally came time to use the gun, did he really think he was going to be the only one who had one?
That scene kind of ticked me off, too. I guess there wasn’t anywhere else to cross the river, but it seems like they should have seen the throngs gathered there and decided that this was not the best crossing place. Sure it’s a bit morbid, but had they waited a few hours they could have avoided the people entirely.
Most of my enjoyment of the the movie came from imagining what the world would really be like if this kind of thing were to happen. It’s something I think about with reasonable frequency, given my perhaps previously disclosed utter fear of nuclear annihilation. Like the movie that spawned my irrational fears, which forecasted our distruction at the hands of nuclear weapons, this movie really suspended my disbelief in aliens and such to get me thinking about the world in the aftermath of an alien invasion. Really though, if you could survive an attack like that for even a few days, it would be amazing. Seeing someone else in this movie go through it was very entertaining to me.
Overall, War of the Worlds wasn’t too bad. I enjoyed it. I didn’t even think about Tom Cruise’s wacko antics once while I was watching it. My grade - B.
Ultraviolet, on the other hand… Where do I even begin with what’s wrong here?
I guess this movie is supposed to be based on a comic book? Is it? The opening sequence seems to indicate that it is, what with all of the comic book covers. The movie leaves me sure that I have no interest in persuing it.
Essentially, Ultraviolet (Milla Jovovich) is some kind of vampire, although she never sucks anyone’s blood or gets burnt in sunlight, who can pull weapons of various sorts from another dimension (no, it’s not a super power, apparently everyone cool can do it in this movie) in her quest to free the “Hemophages” (vampires) from persecution. She uses guns and swords a lot and kicks a lot of butt trying to steal Daxus’ (played by Nick Chinlund, who I simply can’t stand) secret weapon for killing off the last of the vampires.
What happened to the spunky chick who starred in the Fifth Element? This Ultraviolet character hardly does anything action-wise that isn’t covered up with lousy special effects.
In most scenes where Ultraviolet is fighting people, there is a group of guys with swords. All of the guys run at her all at once, surround her in a circle so that you can’t see her, then she erupts from the bunch knocking them all over, dead. Huh? How did she do that? Where is the seriously cool ninjitsu?
In another scene, she jumps off of a building and lands on the pavement Underworld-style, cracking the sidewalk. Cool, except the effect is done so poorly… Record me pretending to jump off a building, cut the shot where it’s apparent that I didn’t really jump, and then splice that onto a shot of me standing up from an already-cracked sidewalk. That’s essentially what we’re talking about here.
I never really considered Jovovich a great actress. Let’s face it, she’s eye candy. But she had her opportunity to prove herself as a female action star, and just didn’t cut it in this film. Moreover, they made her up to look somewhat ugly. So if she’s not pulling off the action, and she’s going to look kind of ugly, why did you hire her?
Let me speak to Nick Chinlund for a moment. I’m not sure what it is, but I hate this dude. I can’t stand looking at him. It’s like when you go to the museum and see a work of art and it repulses you, the sight of this man does the same for me. I can’t look at him without thinking “B-Movie”. That said, I try not to taint me appreciation of a good movie by the actors who play in it. Unfortunately here, there is no good movie.
The plot is pretty thin. The only really “creative” element here is the twist in which Daxus decides to change his company’s business model. In this age, though, don’t most companies do that? It’s no so much a prescient element as it appears as if the writers said, “Now what?” And then they gave up. “Kid in a suitcase? Yeah, run with that!”
So… If you hadn’t already guess this, my evaluation of Ultraviolet is a nice solid “F”.
