AEON FLUX

It's not easy being a future assassin

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Review

99% of the world's population was killed off by the industrial disease. 400 years later, the last remnants of the human race live within a single walled city, an ordered civilisation holding back the ravages of the world outside which has returned to the wild. This civilisation is ruled over by the Goodchild dynasty and peace has reigned. That peace is now threatened by a group of terrorist/freedom fighters who have seen that people are going missing and that all is not well in the perfect society. Their main weapon is Aeon Flux, the perfect assassin. The time has come to strike, but Aeon is about to find out that things are not quite as simple as they seemed and that the enemy might not be quite as evil as she has been led to believe.

AEON FLUX comes to us on a wave of box office failure and derision. There have been many reviews playing on the fact that the character's surname rhymes with "sucks" or even taking the "l" out, but can it really be as bad as all that?

The answer is, inevitably, no. This is not to say that AEON FLUX is a good film, because it isn't, but nor is it the train wreck it has been made out to be.

Negatives first. The film is a muddled mess on almost every level. The plot scattershots off in all kinds of directions and never really knows what it wants to be. Is it a sci-fi romp? Does it have something to say about modern life, science and cloning? Is it about the human spirit? The fact that it is based on a series of MTV short animations might account for this schizophrenia. The underlying science is also a bit dodgy. We are told that cloning takes place from stored DNA and then we are told that subsequent lives bring out the past identitites. Surely, if the original DNA is used then the condition could not be progressive?

The action doesn't work either. Clearly, director Karyn Kusama can't direct action and so the fights scenes are all edited to muddy the fight scenes to camouflage this fact. The saving grace that the fight scenes could have been are, therefore, wasted. Not to mention that the character's raison d'etre is violence and killing, so why isn't there any good violence and killing. For that matter, where did all these expendable soldiers come from. This is supposed to be the ultimate civilisation and yet the place is crawling with stormtroopers. It just doesn't hang together.

Positives then (and yes, there are some). Charlize Theron is just about the most beautiful woman on the planet and giving her a brunette makeover can't change that. She's in almost every shot, so there is plenty of time for the boys to drool over her.

The plot does have some things to say about the nature of evil, the nature of humanity and the the nature of greed and power. It is nice that the heroine has to struggle to understand what's going on and when the plot's cloning issues are actually revealed there is more depth than might have beene expected. And then the bullets start to fly.

In the final analysis, there is more wrong with AEON FLUX than is right with it, but switch off your brain and look at the eye candy that is Charlize Theron and it won't be time totally wasted.

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