director
Karyn Kusama
screenwriters
Phil Hay
Matt Manfredi
based on
the animated series by
Peter Chung
producers
David Gale
Gregory Goodman
Gale Anne Hurd
Gary Lucchesi
cinematographer
Stuart Dryburgh
music
Graeme Revell
editors
Peter Honess
Plummy Tucker
cast
Charlize Theron (Aeon Flux)
Marton Csokas (Trevor Goodchild)
Jonny Lee Miller (Oren Goodchild)
Sophie Okonedo (Sithandra)
Frances McDormand (Handler)
Pete Postlethwaite (Keeper)
Amelia Warner (Una Flux)
mpaa rating: PG-13
running
time: 93m
u.s.
release: 12/2/05
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official
website
|
Inaugurated as part of the
trippy Liquid Television block of MTV in the early '90s,
Peter Chung's Aeon Flux sped along stylishly and plotlessly.
In its first short segments, the angular and deadly Aeon died
at the end of every clip. Art objects in and of themselves, watchable
in any order, the expanded 1995 episodes brazenly ignored any
sense of continuity. Chung's aesthetic -- anime by way
of Egon Schiele -- couldn't be more different from that of Karyn
Kusama, who wrote and directed the intimate independent film
Girlfight five years ago. A gritty drama about a girl
(Michelle Rodriguez) with deep anger that found expression in
the boxing ring -- and worth ten of the mawkish Million
Dollar Baby -- the movie found power in closely observed
details like crude Magic-Markered signs in the gym, or overattended
parties in neat but tacky homes.
I can't think of a good reason
that we are now looking at Karyn Kusama's Aeon Flux,
other than Kusama's previously stated jones to make a sci-fi
flick, and the cosmetic connection of two-fisted feminism. On
the evidence, Kusama is far better at evoking the real world
than at creating a new one, and she's absolute rubbish at big
action scenes. In her hands -- or, rather, in the oafish hands
of screenwriters Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi -- Aeon Flux
becomes this year's Matrix wannabe,
and less intelligent and enjoyable than MTV's other transplant
to the big screen, Beavis and Butt-Head
Do America. (B&B-H creator Mike Judge
once said that the studio wanted a live-action Beavis and
Butt-Head movie, with Adam Sandler and David Spade. That
studio exec finally got his/her wish with Aeon Flux,
which should've been an animated feature.)
Charlize Theron's Aeon Flux
looks sensational in an early scene, wearing a veil that doubles
as a cowl; the effect is both elegant and pulpy, like Gayle Hunnicutt's
cat-suited, masked heroine in Georges Franju's Shadowman.
Aeon curls tongues with a man in the street, receiving a mouth-to-mouth
pill that takes her into a headspace meeting with a fright-wigged
Frances McDormand. The unexplained freakiness of this is true
to the tone of Chung's toon, though nothing else is. Aeon is
on a mission to take down Travis Goodchild (Marton Csokas), the
leader of a sterile, oppressive city circa 2415, where a surviving
five million people live walled off from nature and are subject
to periodic disappearances. The relationship between Aeon and
Travis lacks the gnarled complexity of the animated series, and
is rather too neatly capped by an underwhelming plot twist.
After Girlfight,
which painted a picture with nary a white face without making
a big point of it, how could Kusama be satisfied with a movie
in which the pale, almost Aryan heroine (she even has a Hitler
'do at times) teams up with a black sidekick (Sophie Okonedo)
who has hands where her feet should be -- like a monkey? This
sidekick also betrays Aeon due to a misunderstanding caused by
Travis' scheming brother Oren (Jonny Lee Miller) -- you just
can't get good help these days. Aeon Flux has its show-stoppers,
like a field of razor-sharp grass, but overall the script doesn't
even try to duplicate Chung's art-school ingenuity. The cartoon
was intended, in part, as a parody of empty, self-resolving action
blowouts; Paramount, perversely or perhaps spitefully, has returned
Aeon Flux to what it once transcended.
Maybe Charlize Theron wanted
to glam up and kick ass. But she doesn't have Aeon's slinky physique
-- no actress does -- so she just runs through her paces, sustaining
a highly publicized spine trauma in the process, and for what?
To become yet another femme action figure in a dumbed-down Saturday-night
flick for teenagers? There isn't a hint of the actress who earned
her Oscar for Monster in this
blank performance (Theron has been better even in such crap as
Trapped and The
Astronaut's Wife). She's about the only eye candy on
the screen; with ready-made storyboards from the show, the movie
opts for schlock-deco architecture and uninspired costuming.
By the time poor Pete Postlethwaite shows up in an outfit that
makes him look like a pink raisin in a pickle jar, Aeon Flux
has traded Peter Chung's iconoclastic incomprehensibility for
big-studio incomprehensibility. Guns go off, stuff blows up,
and Karyn Kusama's voice, so loud and strong in Girlfight,
gets drowned out -- hopefully not forever.
|