Short Synopsis: 044 betrays her organization.
Highlights: Fixes the movie’s mistakes.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8/10
I tried watching the movie Ultraviolet, to get an understanding of why everyone seemed to hate it. Well, I lasted 30 minutes until the pain made me stop watching. That was exactly what I feared that this anime-series would turn out to be, and let me say that the Ultraviolet anime fixes a lot of the mistakes of the movie.
The movie was a horrible mish-mash of random fights and cheesy dialogues. The little story that was there was a combination of the original setting of the comic books and a plot that made no sense, where 044 rescued a child that could have been the doom of her entire kind… just so that she could be saved… or something like that. It’s at that point where I just gave up and stopped watching the movie.
The biggest mistake in the movie was the fights, though. Enemies dress in the most ridiculous outfits, you never know who they are, they’re just… there and supposedly security-staff and they die within 5 seconds. Instead of trying to protect their lives, they go for overly cheesy poses (one particularly bad scene featured them as they surrounded 044, stood around her in a perfect circle and… all shot at her. Combined with 044’s amazing talent to evade bullets (in the movie, at least), what where they thinking?
And here comes Osamu Dezaki, and he managed to successfully put some focus away from the action, and focused much more on the personal aspect of the characters. There’s still action, but the goons that 044 has to defeat are given an identity: you know what they’re doing there. 044 also doesn’t have the ability to dodge bullets anymore, and not all people that stand in front of her have to be slaughtered. This episode shows that she just gives that treatment to the goons from her organization.
Both the movie and the anime feature 044 as she betrays her organization. In the anime, she does so because she suddenly fell in love, and saved one of her supposed enemies, and she’d do more for him that for her organization, which I suspect she never liked anyway. In the movie, I guess she falls in love too… with a 10 year old boy who never says anything and who turns out to be the son of some of the major enemies. I guess, that’s the only explanation I can think off to make her actions there seem at least a bit plausible.
But boy, this surely turned out to be the dark horse of the summer-season. Three episodes and still no subs? I guess that this can be blamed to the bad reputation of the original movie. I can really say that I like this series now, though. My biggest fears, of this turning into Devil May Cry II with a bunch of boring fights were avoided completely. So far, there hasn’t been any trace of filler at all, and with the current storyline, I’d be surprised if the creators would manage to stuff one in.
I’m also really annoyed at the lack of subs, especially considering the groups are yet again morbidly obsessed with working on shows have already been subbed.
Seriously, somebody pick up this series.
You should watch the British TV series even if it shares nothing but the name with this.