Aeon Flux

In a mix of The Island and The Cell, and a little bit of Elektra, a very lesbian looking first scene opens up Aeon Flux, Charlize Theron's follow up to her Oscar winning performance in Monster a few years ago. Based on the beloved Peter Chung MTV cartoon that was part of Liquid TV back in the 90s, the series' style is well translated, as good as possible I would say, to the big screen by director Karyn Kusama and writers Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi. They have a pretty good story, great visuals, but they fail completely in the dialogue department, which is awfully delivered by top notch, award winning actresses. If they can't do it, imagine how bad it is.

But that's the dialogue, because the story got me interested and it's actually smart. 400 Years in the future, what's left of us formed in an utopic civilization and live all together in Bregna, the only hospitable city on Earth thanks to the walls that protect us from whatever is outside, including the disease that wiped us out years ago. Bregna is ruled by scientist, led by the Goodchild family, and since there's a ruler in Marton Csokas' Trevor Goodchild and his younger brother Oren (played by Jonny Lee Miller), there's also a rebel group in the Monicans, who are led by Frances McDormand's Handler. The Monicans are an underground group of gadget equipped and martial arts trained killers that our heroine Aeon is part of. Charlize plays Aeon of course and she's cool. Great costumes and she always looks very sexy and beautiful. She was the most credible in the acting department (the rest were not good) but that dialogue was still troubling. McDormand is there's for maybe 3 short scenes total, and she's got a weird Carrot-Top like hairdo. She's pretty much wasted here but I guess we didn't need her that much. And then there's Sophie Okonedo who plays Aeon's sidekick Sithandra. Not much to say about her other than one of the coolest ideas ever put on a movie: she's got hands instead of feet. And it's awesome.

The story later incorporates some nice cloning ideas as Aeon discovers the truth about the government and about some people that have been kidnapped and disappeared lately, including her sister, and the movie is interesting or the most part. With cool costumes and gadgets, and a few pretty good backgrounds and futuristic ideas, Aeon Flux is weak compared to the great cartoon, but is not a bad movie at all.