movies: aeon flux

I swear, if I live to be 150, I will never ever understand Hollywood's obsession with taking a fully cohesive property, be it a play, a book or a teevee series and turning it into a movie that has little to nothing to actually do with the property it's based on other than the names of the characters and a few incidental things here and there...

You can pretty much tell how I felt about Aeon Flux after we'd been to see it tonight, can't you...

I adored the old Aeon Flux cartoon series... it lived up to the subtitle of this blog in spades... often vague and sometimes homicidally esoteric... but it was beautiful, so long as you didn't try to take it literally or expect it to make sense outside it's own internal logic and just enjoyed the visual storytelling.

When I first heard they were doing a live action version, I was a whole world of sceptically raised eyebrow... I mean, c'mon... half of the joy of Aeon Flux was Peter Chung's highly stylised art... and that was also the reason why I was so pleased to see he'd contributed a piece to The Animatrix (disturbingly enough though, part way through watching it at the movies I suddenly thought how cool it would have been if he'd been involved, and lo and behold, two segments later, Matriculated came on)... but honestly, I knew that there was no way in the world that they could possibly pull off Aeon Flux as live action.

And I was right.

Sure, the movie works pretty well on it's own merits... but unlike Corey at OpieBlue I did get the animated series (so maybe that's a prerequisite for getting the movie, you didn't understand the series)... but basically with the exception of the character names, the fact that one of the characters had hands on her feet, and one or two other things, this movie had NOTHING to do with the series or with the world of Aeon Flux...

The series has two countries, the movie has one big city... as far as I'm aware the main villain, Trevor Goodchild, never had a brother, and I don't think Aeon had a sister, but I could be wrong about that... and the whole plotline of the movie... while it wasn't completely out of line with the kind of stories Chung excelled at, it definitely wasn't something that I think the series would ever have tried to pull off, just for the ongoing consequences of it.

Basically you could have taken the movie, changed all the character names, plus a few details here and there and called this movie something else and I don't think that anyone who had seen the Aeon Flux series would have connected the two together in any way.

I couldn't even get lost in the visuals of the thing because the story kept grating on my nerves... to be honest, even there it lost out to the series in some ways... particularly in Aeon's costuming... and yes, I realise the outfit from the series is never going to look good on any actual flesh and blood human being... but could they at least have paid homage to it?

A lot of the German locations (both inside and outside) were really beautiful, but you never know with this type of movie what's real, what's been added to or extended and what's purely a digital matte painting or a set.

I also don't know what they did to Jonny Lee Miller to make him look so damn unsexy... I think it was just bad hairstyling, but man, that just shouldn't be allowed! I did like the very brief cameo at the beginning by Charlize Theron's real life squeeze, Stuart Townsend as an overly mascaraed spy who passes Aeon a message by way of French kiss... he was looking kind of hot.

Having said all that, if you're someone who isn't familiar with the original series, then you may well enjoy the movie... for the most part it was well done, if a touch over predictable and a little too "oh look, social commentary" in spots.

yani's rating: 1 Monican spy out of 5