Caught Aeon Flux today, finally. I’d been dreading seeing this movie ever since I first caught wind of exactly what Hollywood was planning for everyone’s favorite psycho assassin back in 2004. You know how sometimes, when you go into a movie theater expecting the worst, you actually end up being mildly entertained by the movie, just because it’s not as bad as you thought it’d be?
Well, this isn’t one of those times.
You can tell that this movie is going to be a stinker within the first couple of minutes (that is, right after the fan-pleasing eyelash-fly-trap intro). Charlize Theron’s hushed voiceover tells us the story of the world of 2415, where the last vestiges of humanity live in a walled dystopia, ruled by a tyrannical government, opposed by a handful of enlightened rebels, blah blah blah blah blah … Essentially, it’s Brave New World. (In other words, nothing we haven’t heard a dozen times before.) She ends the monologue with yet another piece of startlingly obvious information, that she is, in fact, one of those rebels.
No shit, Sherlock.
Now, it’s not that I have anything against the dystopic-society plot. Many movies and books have built on this classic concept and created something fresh and invigorating (the upcoming V For Vendetta, the classic and soon-to-be-remade Logan’s Run, the first Mad Max, Brazil, Minority Report, etc.); Aeon Flux, meanwhile, joins the myriad other works that borrow too much from Brave New World, but have precious few ideas of their own. Towards the end of the movie, I had been reduced to counting how many times Charlize Theron’s wrinkles showed through the layers of makeup.
I suppose the really painful thing about this movie (as is often the case with films based on works in a different medium) is just how far the proverbial apple has fallen from the tree. Regardless of whether you actually understood any of the original Aeon Flux animated shorts, you could tell that there was a kind of bizarre genius behind each episode. The movie, meanwhile, is equally bizarre, except that instead of genius, I see … retardation.
The filmmakers try so hard to capture some of the surreal, bordering-on-nonsense stylings of Peter Chung’s classic series, but it simply eludes them for most of the film’s running time. The problem, I think, is that they were operating under the assumption that if their audience couldn’t understand what was going on, they’d get turned off. So all of the tricks and all of the "crazy" gadgetry are these dry, run-of-the-mill things that do little to impress or awe the viewers. What the hell man, not getting what was going on was what I loved about that darned show.