Aeon Flux Review

(WARNING: The following review is basically nothing but one, big spoiler. Ignore this post if you intend to see this movie. Not that, you know, you should.)

“New Rule: In her next movie, Charlize Theron has to be sexy again. We get it. You're a serious actress. Now how about playing a lesbian superhero named Nympho? Or that hot teacher in Florida who bangs her students?” - Bill Maher, “Real Time with Bill Maher,” 10/14/2005

I would officially like to ask Mr. Maher to please stick to commenting on politics and social issues and shut the hell up about the movies. Charlize Theron’s daring belief in lesser projects, what you so off-handedly dismiss as the temptation to be considered a “serious actress,” has brought us films like “Monster” and “North Country”. The desire to objectify her and persuade her to cash in on her looks has now brought us “Aeon Flux.” The phrase, I believe, is “case closed.”

Indeed, “Aeon Flux” gives us few options but to regard Theron for her beauty. She either wears skin-tight outfits or next-to-nothing for virtually the entire running time, and the role she’s in gives her no opportunity (or motivation) to demonstrate her considerable acting skills. Like Halle Berry in the much-maligned “Catwoman,” here is one of the top actresses of her generation, completely reduced to the most superficial of her gifts. The lack of an intelligent story surrounding her merely exacerbates the issue.

The plot, as outlined by a pre-opening series of subtitles, is that in 2011, a massive plague strikes the globe, killing 99% of the human race. Then, “scientists find a cure.” Well, better late than never, I guess. The remaining five million survivors are herded together into a one, big, walled-in mega-city, so that if another plague strikes them, it won’t have to work quite as hard to kill everyone off, I suppose. They are lead by the guy who oh-so-efficiently found the cure in the first place, Dr. Goodchild, who becomes the chairman of this new civilization. And it stays like that for 400 years.

Okay, stop and consider what you’ve just read for a second. 5 million survivors, walled into a single city. Considering the relative amount of population growth on the real Earth in a comparable amount of time, logic states that the number of remaining people should have outgrown that little city in about, say, 50 years, tops. Ah ha, but there is a reason they haven’t we will eventually discover, though why this little factoid has not occurred to ANYONE in the city in all this time, well, that’s anyone’s guess.

Okay, so back to the exposition, which switches to narration rather than subtitles, we meet Aeon Flux (Theron), whose incredible fighting skills are demonstrated as she catches a fly in her eyelid while lying in bed. She informs us that this “perfect society,” which largely consists of people riding around glassy-eyed on bicycles and wearing pseudo-hippy throwbacks, is not as perfect as it appears. Well, duh. It’s actually an oppressive police state, people live in fear, cannot go outside the walls, yadda yadda. Exchange “futuristic” for “primitive,” and basically it’s “The Village” all over again. And no one needs that.

But anyway. Aeon fights for a band of rebels called the Monicans, who communicate through taking pills which stimulate the cortex of their brain and put them in contact with their leader, the Handler, who is played by Francis McDormand and who borrows Napoleon Dynamite’s hairdo. She sends Aeon on her first assignment, to blow up a pool of some kind or something, but really what she’s doing is distracting Aeon from a dinner with her kid sister, Una, so the plot can have her killed off by the Evil Police State.

Now Aeon’s really mad and so forth, so of course, NOW the Handler sends Aeon on a mission to kill Chairman Goodchild (Martin Csokas), who is not the original Chairman Goodchild but is, in fact, the descendant of that Chairman Goodchild, but just happens to look just like the original Chairman Goodchild. As did all his descendants, apparently. With subtle hints like this, when the big surprise is finally revealed, considering all the generations of people who came before them and had access to all the exact same clues, and yet didn’t figure out squat, I was praying that Francis McDormand would look at her hapless charges and say, “I’m not sure I agree with you 100 percent on your police work there, folks.”

So, anyway, Aeon heads off on her mission to kill the Chairman, accompanied by her friend Sithandra (Sophie Okenedo), who has hands for feet and hands for, uh, hands. Aeon breaks in while Sithandra stands guard outside, gets the drop on Goodchild, but when he calls her “Catherine,” she does nothing and gets conked on the head from behind. Yes, the bad-ass female soldier who we’ve seen take out dozens of thugs with barely a thought is subdued by getting called the wrong name. Having been on the wrong end of that type of exchange before myself, though, I can sympathize.

So, anyway, she’s locked up but not killed, escapes without too much fuss, accosts the chairman in his room, and promptly sleeps with him. This would seem to be contradictory to the mission at hand, but anyway. After she wakes up next to him, she chokes him out (and who hasn’t been there?), finds some clues about some unsettling testing that’s going on, and leaves to meet up with Sithandra (who’s shown the patience of Job times 10, waiting outside while all of this was going on). Rather than take the time to explain to Sithandra what happened in there and why she’s so confused, she proceeds to beat Sithandra up, tie her up, and leave her helpless at the bottom of a fountain, with only a small reed to breathe through. But it’s okay, Sithandra mind-melds with the hive of the Monicans, who are dispatched to free her, and only take, oh, 30 minutes or so of screen time to do so.

Anyway, in the meantime, Chairman Goodchild is overthrown by his wussy little brother Oren, and won’t THAT look embarrassing in the authorized history of these events. Goodchild and Aeon hook up (not that way) and go through a few chase scenes before the true nature of the world is revealed: the virus also rendered everyone on the planet sterile, and ergo, the past 400 years worth of generations have been clones, so when someone dies, they are immediately cloned and someone in the city is impregnated with them. This is demonstrated to Aeon through her finding her little sister, who has just been born to a new couple. Okay, wait. Her sister was just killed, like, 2 days ago. So either: a.) they fertilized the woman nine months prior to them even knowing they’d kill Una, and it was just a lucky guess, or b.) that woman went through the FASTEST pregnancy period on record.

Meanwhile, it’s revealed that Goodchild has discovered the cure to the sterility (again showing the crackerjack pace of his scientific revelations, just like how lightning-fast he found that plague cure), but his brother wants things to keep on going as they are, so he can “live forever,” even though it’s just copies of him that live forever and not actually him, but we’re really just picking nits now, aren’t we? Oh, and the backup Monicans FINALLY get to Sithandra, and they inform her of the coup which overthrew Goodchild, so of course Sithandra and company decide to continue with the mission and kill Goodchild anyway, despite the fact that Goodchild has no power anymore and at one point, the guy who IS in charge now is standing right next to him and not a one of them thinks to train their guns on him instead. These aren’t Monicans, they’re Monican’ts.

Oh, and I didn’t even get to the big, golden balloon that flies over the city piloted by Pete Postlethwaite that looks like a cross between the Goodyear Blimp and a Snork.

But enough. The movie is competent enough on a technical level, I suppose, and the action is well done for being as ludicrous as it is, but it’s all in the service of nothing. Karyn Kusama is a talented director, having made the excellent “Girlfight” back in 2000, so we’ll chalk this up as a misstep into the big leagues and hope she moves on.

There’s a movie I’m betting you haven’t seen called “Dark City.” It is also about a group of humans caught in an isolated situation for reasons they do not comprehend, and the struggle to regain free will from their oppressors. But that film is visionary, revolutionary, groundbreaking, intelligent, exciting, moving - in other words, everything “Aeon Flux” isn’t. So, save yourself the two hours and having to go all the way to the theatre, and just rent “Dark City” instead. Or, just come over to my place and I’ll show it to you. I’ll even spring for the popcorn.