Sunday, December 04, 2005

Movie Review: AEON FLUX

You poor bastard. You just spent a couple of hours watching Aeon Flux, and the reviews have been horrible, and...and...say, you’re smiling!

Yeah. Forget most everything you’ve heard about Aeon Flux being for Oscar-winner Charlize Theron what Catwoman was for Oscar-winner Halle Berry: a bomb. Aeon Flux isn’t a bomb. It’s a fairly smart sci-fi movie that probably owes more to writers like Philip K. Dick than to Peter Chung’s original MTV cartoon series. Still, it’s visually faithful to Chung (as faithful as a live-action adaptation of a cartoon can be, anyway)...and hell, it’s 90-plus minutes of Theron wearing black Lycra (when she’s wearing clothes at all) and shooting big guns. Very cool.

Is the movie really anything like the Chung cartoon series?

Sure. As I said before, it’s visually true to the cartoons. There are moments pulled directly from the series, even Aeon trapping a fly in her eyelashes, which comes from the series’ credit sequence. Aeon is there, of course. And Trevor Goodchild. And others from the cartoons. What really separates the movie from the series is that, weird as it truly is, the movie actually offers a linear story, which Chung never did. It does make sense. There are mysteries to be solved. And Aeon solves them.

So you like it?

I like it. I don’t love it. It’s not as emotionally involving as I’d like, but then, neither was the cartoon show. Like the series, the movie’s mostly fascinating to watch. You can’t take your eyes from the screen, because you’re afraid you might miss something really bizarre and cool. And then there’s Charlize Theron and the Lycra outfits.

Would you recommend Aeon Flux?

For big fans of Charlize Theron in black Lycra, yes. For fans of movies like Equilibrium, Gattaca, Code 46, and The Man Who Fell to Earth, yes. For fans of real, honest-to-gawd science fiction ideas, yeah. People who only like sci-fi of the Star Trek variety should probably stay away.

And the general movie-going public?

The wider movie-going public should stick to Yours, Mine, and Ours.

-----
Technorati Tags:

1 Comments:

At 2:19 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I too enjoyed this movie.

In appearance, it was very faithful to the cartoon (except for Aeon herself, her hair wasn't he same and her dress was nowhere near as skimpy). Also, Trevor was actually a really good guy in this one, as was Aeon (in the cartoon you could never be sure.)

I was very impressed with the imagination of the world of the future - seldom in movies do you see futures THAT far removed from today. In other futuristic movies, you can kind of extrapolate where the technologies came from. But in AEON FLUX a lot of them were so "out there" where you couldn't guess. I really enjoyed that - who can foresee which direction technology will go in 400 years?

I took my "significant other", who'd never seen the cartoon, to see this movie, and she was thorougly bored - I agree with the recommendation not to bring "mainstream" movie reviewers to this - they just won't get it.

 

Post a Comment

<< Home