"Aeon Flux”
Paramount Pictures
Directed by Karyn Kusama
Charlize Theron, Martin Csokas, Jonny Lee Miller, Pete Postlethwaite, Sophie Okonedo and Frances McDormand.
Rated PG-13

1 1/2 Stars

Sure, I watched “Aeon Flux” when it aired on MTV back in the ‘90s. It was a trippy series of surreal animations, but it only really succeeded because of one great image where the title character is able to trap a fly with her eyelashes. Visually, it was pretty cool stuff, but story-wise, “Aeon Flux” was such a futuristic mish-mash of ideas and bad dialogue that it was impossible to tell what was really going on.
The same holds true for the new movie version of “Aeon Flux.” Visually, there are some pretty cool images and ideas—although there are also some real scary hairdos and costumes. It’s not the bad hair that dooms “Aeon Flux,” but rather a story so convoluted that the rest of the film collapses under the strain of disbelief (or is it disinterest?)

“Aeon Flux” posits that 400 years from now, most of humanity will have been wiped out by a pandemic, leaving only a small group of survivors walled-up inside the utopian city of Bregnia. Charlize Theron stars a rebel warrior, determined to assassinate the city’s leader (Martin Csokas) because the government seems to be behind the murder of her sister. Yet when she finally comes face to face with her target, she can’t pull the trigger. He seems somehow familiar, so she sleeps with him instead.

Who knew that quickie-affairs would survive well into the 25th century?

“Aeon Flux” is a flop because of some very ham-fisted dialogue, pedantic direction and a story that doesn’t make much sense (something about freedom fighters and the morality of cloning). It quickly digresses into a series of standard-fare gun fights and explosions, reminiscent of every other action movie except that this time the hero is a hot woman with a freaky haircut.

Worst of all is the fact that there’s no reason to care about Aeon Flux the character, and she doesn’t seem to care about anyone other than her dead sister. At one point she abandons a subway car full of bullet-ridden passengers, concerned only with her own superficial wounds. A single-minded killing machine may work well as a villain, but not as the hero that we’re supposed to identify with.

The bottom line is that “Aeon Flux” isn’t as bad as I feared it might be, but it’s certainly nothing more than a run-of-the-mill action flick that just happens to have some cool set designs; and even the sets loose their appeal after the first fifteen minutes.


Movie reviews by Sean, “The Movie Guy,” are published Wednesdays and Fridays in “The Port Arthur News” and he can be heard weekly on KOLE and KVIC Radio. For more reviews, log on to www.seanthemovieguy.com. Sean welcomes your comments via email at emshon@cox.net.