Amateur Megalomania

I grew up in the eighties and nineties. MTV was a staple, back when they actually showed interesting content. Peter Chung’s Aeon Flux was a bizarre little anime short that popped up from time to time on Liquid Television, and I was immediately intrigued.

Here we had a story without background, depicting a strange world of garish costumes, casual violence, and a fantastically fatal character in Aeon Flux. The short clips had no dialogue, and always ended with Aeon dying. It wasn’t until later that longer episodes came along with dialogue and we began to piece together Aeon’s strange world. You can see some examples here.

When I heard about the movie, I immediately thought it would be a train wreck. How in the world would they capture all of that strangeness in a live-action film? How are they going to handle Aeon’s impossibly scanty uniforms on a real actress? When I heard that Charlize Theron would star, I thought ‘well, maybe they could do it’. After all, Theron (like Ashley Judd) seems to contractually require a nude scene in every film she makes. Not that I’m complaining.

Alas, the primary question of most Flux fans has to be answered in the negative: the uniforms are properly utilitarian. Gravity can’t be ignored in a live action film, at least not to the required extent to make it work.

Other questions remained. In the animated Flux, Aeon had a strange relationship with Trevor Goodchild, the head of state of the rival faction. Inevitably, her assassination mission would be put on hold long enough to sleep with Trevor, before one of them ended up dead. How would all of this translate in the live-action film?

Pretty well, I have to say. Four hundred years from now, 99.9% of the world has been killed by ‘the Industrial Disease’. The Goodchild family engineered a cure to the plague, and now rule the only remaining city-state on earth. People live in a walled city, cut off from the rest of the world. But all is not happy in paradise. Aeon is a Monican, an underground cabal of rebels intent on bringing down the Goodchild reign and…well, beyond that it is a bit fuzzy. Aeon is just another talented agent when her sister is murdered due to Aeon’s association with the Monicans. This is the catalytic event that leads to her going after Trevor.

Flux is a visual movie. It has a lot of flash, and they’ve done a pretty good job of capturing the feel of the anime. Unfortunately, it breaks down pretty quickly under any close examination of the plot or the depicted events. A few action sequences seem to have little point beyond the action. In one scene, Flux and her partner in assassination make this wild dash across a secure killing field to approach the Goodchild palace. They do this in broad daylight, and her partner takes two wounds from the organic defenses without any consequence. After breaching security, they seem to come and go from the palace with ease, and no one seems to notice. I would expect that even the most advanced security cordon would have some sort of notification system, even if it did take out an intruder. Examples like this abound.

The overall back-story behind the disease, the cure, the ruling dynasty, and the transformation of Trever as a sympathetic character and love interest for Aeon is well done. I was buying all of it.

But the specifics of the film are a jumbled mess. The logical continuity is ignored. People live in a police state, but that doesn’t stop three Monicans from ascending Damn Tall Communication Towers with sniper rifles and plugging away at the Chairman and his police force. Aeon Flux could have been a much better film with a little more effort.

And Charlize Theron keeps her clothes on.

What’s up with that?

Filed under: Reviews (Books and Movies)