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On Friday afternoon I found myself trapped between meetings in a Godforsaken hellhole miles from civilisation (Birmingham City Centre) and so, with a few hours to spare I decided to catch Aeon Flux at the cinema. Like Underworld:Evolution, I’ve seen some pretty impressively stinking reviews of AF and so I was perversely looking forward to it. There’s nothing like a film with no redeeming features to make for a jolly slagging off on LJ later and, like U:E, AF looked to be another film with a girl in corsetry defying the law of gravity and not much else.
The film starts lacklustrely enough. It’s the future, and 99% of humanity has been wiped out by a disease leaving the survivors living in the last city of Bregna, a walled Utopia. You can tell it’s a future utopia because everyone wears clothes in pastel and earthy colours, never works, and has all the papaya they can eat. However, this future utopia has a dark side (don’t they all); it’s really a totalitarian state where dissenters are ‘disappeared’! Unlike most future totalitarian states, this one isn’t ruled by aging British character actors who need the work; no, Bregna is instead ruled by a bunch of West-Coast Metrosexuals. As a result, my sympathies are immediately with the rebels, who are fighting ‘for the disappeared.’ You can instantly spot the rebels because, unlike absolutely everyone else in Bregna, they wear leather and heavy eyeliner. Despite this obvious giveaway, the ruling regime hasn’t rounded up all the Goths and capped them (a nifty bit of social engineering which would improve any society) – instead they round up and shoot their relations instead, a tactic guaranteed to make them settle down.
So far, so Logan’s Run.
Aeon Flux is the name of the best agent the rebels have; despite everyone else in Bregna being called things like Bob, Dave, and Wendy, nobody ever says “Gosh, Aeon Flux, that’s a funny name. A bit of dirty work at the font done there, eh?” It’s just something that passes without comment because, in the future, we’ll be used to people being called stupid names. It’s just one step from Brooklyn Beckham.
We open with an exciting scene in which Aeon, who wears black leather and eyeliner during the day, demonstrates her super-agent skills by infiltrating a top-secret government facility at night whilst wearing a Persil-white catsuit. Camouflage notwithstanding, she kills a lot of faceless goons and damages the Metrosexual government in some way.
There’s more of this, with a succession of CGI-assisted stuntwork, bluescreen work and sundry other nonsense when about half an hour in, utterly unexpectedly, a plot appears. And to make things worse, it’s not a bad plot.
Imagine my dismay. There I was, smirk on face and fingers laced over popcorn-distended belly, gleefully thinking up rude things to say about the film - when something happened to make me sit up and think “Oh, now that’s interesting.”
It really wasn’t fair.
It’s the plot which redeems the film, and not just the plot. Aeon Flux has a tremendously well-visualised future society based on Biotechnology, which informs not just the science of the culture, but also it’s design aesthetic. The design work is great, and the biotech is imaginative and at times exists for purposes other than the CGI being capable of depicting it. The plot, whilst being no Usual Suspects is sufficiently interesting to have prevented me from dozing off. All in all, AF isn’t anything like as bad a film as it might have been.
It’s not all great, obviously. Plot and aesthetic might be redeeming features, but it is let down by terrible acting and dialogue. Despite the lead being played by Charlize Theron, who famously won an Oscar for bravely playing a woman with a prosthetic rubber nose, the quality of acting and dialogue never really rises above the level of mediocre. Consider the following exchange:
Villain:What is it that you want?
Aeon: I want my sister back.
Sound familiar? It should to anyone who has ever seen The Princess Bride. However, unlike Inigo Montoya’s anger and despair-filled delivery as he runs Count Rugen through the heart, the exchange in Aeon Flux could just as well have been performed by two lengths of knotty pine being jiggled up and own in front of a green-screen for all the emotional conviction identical delivers here.
Overall: 2.5 stars out of five.
The film starts lacklustrely enough. It’s the future, and 99% of humanity has been wiped out by a disease leaving the survivors living in the last city of Bregna, a walled Utopia. You can tell it’s a future utopia because everyone wears clothes in pastel and earthy colours, never works, and has all the papaya they can eat. However, this future utopia has a dark side (don’t they all); it’s really a totalitarian state where dissenters are ‘disappeared’! Unlike most future totalitarian states, this one isn’t ruled by aging British character actors who need the work; no, Bregna is instead ruled by a bunch of West-Coast Metrosexuals. As a result, my sympathies are immediately with the rebels, who are fighting ‘for the disappeared.’ You can instantly spot the rebels because, unlike absolutely everyone else in Bregna, they wear leather and heavy eyeliner. Despite this obvious giveaway, the ruling regime hasn’t rounded up all the Goths and capped them (a nifty bit of social engineering which would improve any society) – instead they round up and shoot their relations instead, a tactic guaranteed to make them settle down.
So far, so Logan’s Run.
Aeon Flux is the name of the best agent the rebels have; despite everyone else in Bregna being called things like Bob, Dave, and Wendy, nobody ever says “Gosh, Aeon Flux, that’s a funny name. A bit of dirty work at the font done there, eh?” It’s just something that passes without comment because, in the future, we’ll be used to people being called stupid names. It’s just one step from Brooklyn Beckham.
We open with an exciting scene in which Aeon, who wears black leather and eyeliner during the day, demonstrates her super-agent skills by infiltrating a top-secret government facility at night whilst wearing a Persil-white catsuit. Camouflage notwithstanding, she kills a lot of faceless goons and damages the Metrosexual government in some way.
There’s more of this, with a succession of CGI-assisted stuntwork, bluescreen work and sundry other nonsense when about half an hour in, utterly unexpectedly, a plot appears. And to make things worse, it’s not a bad plot.
Imagine my dismay. There I was, smirk on face and fingers laced over popcorn-distended belly, gleefully thinking up rude things to say about the film - when something happened to make me sit up and think “Oh, now that’s interesting.”
It really wasn’t fair.
It’s the plot which redeems the film, and not just the plot. Aeon Flux has a tremendously well-visualised future society based on Biotechnology, which informs not just the science of the culture, but also it’s design aesthetic. The design work is great, and the biotech is imaginative and at times exists for purposes other than the CGI being capable of depicting it. The plot, whilst being no Usual Suspects is sufficiently interesting to have prevented me from dozing off. All in all, AF isn’t anything like as bad a film as it might have been.
It’s not all great, obviously. Plot and aesthetic might be redeeming features, but it is let down by terrible acting and dialogue. Despite the lead being played by Charlize Theron, who famously won an Oscar for bravely playing a woman with a prosthetic rubber nose, the quality of acting and dialogue never really rises above the level of mediocre. Consider the following exchange:
Villain:What is it that you want?
Aeon: I want my sister back.
Sound familiar? It should to anyone who has ever seen The Princess Bride. However, unlike Inigo Montoya’s anger and despair-filled delivery as he runs Count Rugen through the heart, the exchange in Aeon Flux could just as well have been performed by two lengths of knotty pine being jiggled up and own in front of a green-screen for all the emotional conviction identical delivers here.
Overall: 2.5 stars out of five.
