I re-watched Ultraviolet the other night. I know, I know. "It's a forgettable action film," you're poised to write. "Why re-watch it?" Well, I had just re-watched another Milla Jovovich action-er, the fifth Resident Evil, and I remembered that I still had my DVD of Ultraviolet and that it was pretty fun when I watched it back in ... November 2010? Yikes! Time flies, doesn't it?
Anyway, it was a fun, mostly forgettable action film that was hated far more than I thought it deserved. Reminds me of pretty much every other female-led action film post-2000. Think about it. All of these did really poorly with critics: Underworld, Elektra, Ultraviolet, Resident Evil, BloodRayne, Doomsday, DOA: Dead or Alive, etc. I had fun with all of those. Regardless, seeing Ultraviolet another time reminded me of one of my favorite video games of all time, Mirror's Edge. I'm not going to go so far as to say that Ultraviolet is exactly what a Mirror's Edge movie should look like, but I think, at times, it's pretty close. About as much as the reboot of the Mummy franchise works as an Uncharted film.
(Spoiler alert for both Ultraviolet and Mirror's Edge, not that the plot matters much in either.)
The basic premise is almost exactly the same. It's the future, and a group of people are hunted by the government because of reasons that aren't really clear and don't matter a whole lot. In Mirror's Edge, it's the
Runners; Ultraviolet has hemophages, or "vampires." Both of these groups are persecuted because of a controlling body that wants to make society some sort of dystopia. Ultraviolet opens with Violet (Milla Jovovich) doing exactly what a Runner does: acquiring some sort of package and delivering it to someone else, all while being chased by armed/armored guards and a helicopter. She's also moving through a computer generated city.
Much of Ultraviolet has Violet running through areas of the city while avoiding the enemies, regardless of who they may be. Faith, the lead character of Mirror's Edge, does the same thing. Eventually, both characters are betrayed by more than one body. The running scenes in Ultraviolet make more use of vehicles than in Mirror's Edge, which is straight parkour, but the basic idea is the same. Violet does find herself on her feet more often than not.
The similarities continue. The depictions of the future are similar. Both are exceptionally clean and crisp. While Ultraviolet's is darker, that's the only real difference. If someone told me that in 2006, someone developed the city most of Ultraviolet takes place in, and then in 2008, that city was ported and had its brightness ramped up to 10 for Mirror's Edge, I would believe it. Some of the tougher enemies found in later levels of Mirror's Edge look just like the majority of the enemies in Ultraviolet: head-to-toe black armor and wielding machine guns that never run out of bullets.
Both the film and the game have comic book elements, despite neither being a previously established franchise. Ultraviolet's opening credits show multiple comic book covers and some pages, too. Mirror's Edge has its between-chapter cutscenes look as if they're a comic book brought to life. The main character in both is female, too, someone who only gets an emotional attachment to one other character. In Ultraviolet, it's Six (Cameron Bright), the young boy who, like Violet, is soon going to die. In Mirror's Edge, it's Kate, Faith's sister. By the end of each story, that is the only emotional connection the main character gets to another.
The plots wind up having betrayal take place. Early on in Ultraviolet, Violet gets betrayed by her fellow hemophages, much like Faith is betrayed by Celeste, who functions as one of the bosses. However, neither of these wind up being the main enemy. In both Mirror's Edge and Ultraviolet, there is a bigger plot to eliminate -- or have the potential to eliminate -- a certain group of individuals. "Project Icarus" in Mirror's Edge will allow for the destruction of the Runners, while the antigen contained in Six's blood will (spoiler alert) be able to infect all humans, even though most of the film makes us think that it's really the hemophages who will be destroyed. The lead characters trying to stop these plans from coming to fruition is what drives them forward. Structurally, the two are nearly identical: (1) Acquire thing, (2) run from stuff for a while, (3) storm the castle in a rescue mission.
Speaking of these characters, they're also not exactly dissimilar from one another. They're both females with naturally black hair who have isolated themselves from much of the world. They have meaningful tattoos -- the one on Faith's shoulder and the ones on Violet's fingers -- the ability to take a hit and regenerate damage. They talk to people with a radio clip in their ear, and they both know how to fire a gun. Combat plays more of a role in Ultraviolet, as its lead character can take out hundreds of men in a matter of minutes, but, then, wasn't that one of the things people disliked about Mirror's Edge? The combat? When you think about it, Faith can take out as many people in Mirror's Edge, if they were to keep coming, thanks to her regenerating health; she just can't dispatch them as quickly as Violet.
Am I stretching just to make this idea somewhat believable? Probably, but I think most of those similarities are there. Both the film and the game are highly stylized, have a similar vision of the future, contain a lot of running from place to place, feature betrayal from a trustworthy body, have a near-identical plot structure, and possess similar protagonists. I couldn't help but think of Mirror's Edge when I re-watched Ultraviolet.
