Aeon Flux
review by Peter T. Chattaway | posted 12/02/2005
 1 of 4
The ads for Aeon Flux don't stress the fact that it is top–heavy with Oscar–caliber actresses, but they could if they wanted to. Based on a popular MTV cartoon, the film stars Charlize Theron—who won an Oscar for playing a beauty–challenged real–life serial killer in Monster—as a sexy futuristic assassin who is working with a group of rebels to take down the totalitarian government ruling their dystopic society. Frances McDormand, who won an Oscar for Fargo and recently co–starred with Theron in a serious–social–issues bit of Oscar bait called North Country, plays Aeon's boss. And Sophie Okonedo, who was nominated for an Oscar for her brilliant, moving performance as Don Cheadle's wife in Hotel Rwanda, plays a fellow rebel who has apparently undergone surgery to replace her feet with hands.
Charlize Theron plays the kick–butt spy of the future
So much talent, and for what? If anyone wants proof that good roles are hard to find, even for actresses who have won the highest praise possible from their colleagues, then they need look no further than this movie. Aeon Flux is one of those films that is so lackluster, the studio refused to show it to critics in advance—figuring, perhaps correctly, that reviews wouldn't make a difference to fans of the original show anyway. Unless, of course, those reviews were to convince those fans that the film had betrayed the show, in which case the reviews would make the wrong sort of difference, from the studio's point of view.
The character Aeon Flux was created by Korean animator Peter Chung for a series of two– or three–minute shorts on MTV's Liquid Television in 1991, and she came back in a series of slightly longer shorts in 1992 and a ten–part series of half–hour episodes in 1995. While Aeon was an anarchist, fighting on behalf of a country called Monica, she also had a sort of on–and–off relationship with her nemesis, Trevor Goodchild, who controlled the neighboring country Breen through science. Filled with fairly graphic violence and sexuality, the show played with post–modern notions of identity by tackling subjects like cloning, memory manipulation and the stimulation of human evolution. The show also challenged typical notions of story continuity by killing off its main character in several episodes. The show is sometimes cited as one of The Matrix's many influences, and indeed, Chung went on to direct the cartoon short 'Matriculated' for the Animatrix anthology a couple years back.
Hey, it's Halle Berry in 'Catwoman.' Or not. It's still Charlize
The movie, written by Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi (Crazy/Beautiful, The Tuxedo), keeps a few elements from the original show but changes pretty much everything else. In this version, set 400 years in the future, virtually the entire human race has been wiped out by a virus, and the few million survivors now live in a city that is walled off from the encroaching forces of nature and controlled by the Goodchild family, whose cure for the disease helped to stop the virus way back when. Aeon is no longer from a neighboring country, but a rebel from within this society. She is also dressed much more modestly, and she has been given something resembling a personal life, in the form of a sister (Amelia Warner) who is killed by government forces early on in the film. So while it was never clear what motivated the cartoon Aeon, the movie Aeon is driven by one thing: revenge.
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