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The live-action, big-screen version of Aeon Flux is slick, sexy and incredibly stupid.
This is Catwoman redux for 2005. That portends disaster. The parallels start with the femme fatale star of each flick.
In Catwoman, Halle Berry segued from her best actress Oscar for Monster’s Ball into a comic-book superhero. She was dressed in a skin-tight, shiny black suit that screamed fetishistic voyeurism — with major S&M overtones.
In Aeon Flux, despite some more noble pursuits along the career path, Charlize Theron segues from her best actress Oscar for Monster into a maverick American anime superheroine. She is dressed in a shiny, skin-tight black suit that screams SEX, SEX, SEX — and ditto on the S&M action.
No red-blood North American boy-man I know objects to seeing either Halle Berry or Charlize Theron decked out in lacquered-on apparel. These get-ups hug every curve, reveal every sinewy muscle and suggest some kind of salacious dreamscape where a wimp-boy can finally become a man.
Trouble is, that dream is never realized. The rest of the dumb-ass PG movie gets in the way. In Catwoman, the action became a silly exercise in rooftop skydiving. In Aeon Flux, there is a heavy-handed plot about the false claims of utopia.
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Aeon Flux is the effects-driven, live action version of Peter Chung’s animated series of the same name. Launched in 1991 as brief snippets on MTV’s late night Liquid Television show, Aeon Flux became a full-fledged, independent series on MTV in 1995.
It is significant that the only place you can find Chung’s credit in the new movie version is in the “characters by” part of the list of screenwriters. So he had little or nothing to do with what the studio wrought from his esoteric but interesting future-shock creation.
Instead, the director is Karyn Kusama, a strange choice, given that her only previous feature was Girlfight (2000), an intensely personal, low-tech drama about a female boxer.
With production designer Andrew McAlpine and cinematographer Stuart Dryburgh, however, Kusama was entrusted to create a post-apocalyptic world more than 400 years in the future. The surviving city of Bregna is run as a utopian fantasyland. But, of course, it is really a fascist/1984 dictatorship in which the rulers are despots and freedom fighters are called terrorists but seem to be battling evil.
Like Chung’s animated series, but with a lot less detail in order to pack the action into a feature length, not all is what it seems. The dictator Trevor Goodchild (Marton Csokas) may not be all bad. His brother Oren Goodchild (Jonny Lee Miller) may not be all well-intentioned.
Meanwhile, the maverick terrorist (Theron) may not be all heroic. And her bizarre terrorist cell (run by Frances McDormand and including Sophie Okonedo of Hotel Rwanda) may not be working for the right people.
The problem with Aeon Flux as a film is that you may not give a damn about any of these freaks. The plot which was fashioned out of Chung’s original by Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi seems utterly pointless and unnecessarily convoluted. Especially because, when you distill it down to its essence, it is a simple-minded story of people grabbing for power and lying about their motives in a dead-pan manner that suggests the actors thought they were playing zombies.
All we are left with is a bodacious, buffed-up, sometimes half-naked Charlize Theron in fetish gear. And Halloween is already over.
BOTTOM LINE
Unless you just want to oogle Charlize Theron, or watch mindless action scenes with a heavy body count, there is nothing much of substance here.
She can thank the Rugrats
From silly kids’ stuff to sexualized anime: Peter Chung created the original Aeon Flux as a direct reaction to the crushing boredom he felt working on Rugrats.
“I was feeling very frustrated at having characters that were very limited in what they could do and things that they could say,” the Korean-American filmmaker says.
The fresh interview is contained in his new DVD, Aeon Flux: The Complete Animated Collection.
Chung was an artist-animator at Nickelodeon during the creation of Rugrats. His job was to draw some of the deliberately ugly, squat kids for the hit children’s show.
“I think that, probably, Aeon Flux came out of my frustration of working with babies and very squat characters who were clumsy,” the droll Chung says. “I wanted to do something that was just the complete opposite of that.”
Aeon Flux, featuring the bizarre, sexually dynamic interaction of a dictator and the terrorist-assassin who is out to kill him in a future world, is the complete opposite. It began as brief blasts of action animation for MTV’s Liquid Television series in 1991. In 1995, it morphed into a stand-alone series. Later, Chung helped design and direct the video game.
The three-disc DVD box set, released Nov. 22, contains the entire series as well as the 12 minutes of shorts from 1991. There are definitive bonus materials, including a history of Aeon Flux, the pilot episode, production art and a group commentary led by Chung for the first two episodes.
Chung also explains how Aeon Flux, the character, got her slightly French-Canadian voice in the 1995 series. She had been silent in the shorts.
“It was a big question of how the language was going to be used, how the dialogue was going to be used to tell the story. I did not want it to be some kind of illustrated radio play where the dialogue was taking the place of things which could be conveyed visually ... To me, the dialogue was just another layer of signs that had to be interpreted. Everything that anyone says in any of these stories has multiple meanings and motives.”
If you need evidence why Hollywood failed so miserably with its live-action version, look no further than these insights. Chung’s vision is the complete opposite of what Hollywood wants in an action movie.