ISBN: 0792186966
Review:
Aeon Flux, the movie, takes place in an enclosed city named Bregna, surrounded by forest, a human cell hiding from a world which killed almost all humans when a pandemic struck. The scientist who found the cure rules the city and has been searching for a cure for the side effect of his medicine, sterility, for four hundred years. Unknown to all but a few, the race survives through cloning. The producer uses the movie as a vehicle to explore the idea of cellular memory and the implications of cloning for power and control. Will cloning ever replace natural reproduction? Is cloning a form of immortality? Will any memories survive from the ‘parent’ body into the cloned body? Such questions keep sci-fi alive as a genre.The city seems like a paradise – on the surface at least. People disappear, others are killed, old people mutter crazily in the streets and there is a band of rebels, the Monicans. What and who are they rebelling against? They communicate with a leader by means of pills and implanted chemicals which take them into a hall where a surreal woman with blazing red hair opens her mouth which becomes a black rose which becomes a swarm of dark insects and so on…The Monicans’ best agent and assassin is Aeon Flux. Aeon herself is full of questions – Who am I? What are these strange dreams and visions? Aeon is sent to kill the scientist king and along with her back-up Sithandra invades the citadel of the ruling elite. The two assasins have a strange relationship, continuously hostile body language and wordplay that might be the Bregna Monican cool way to show toughness but to me just makes it improbable that these two would do any kind of work together successfully at all. They pass through the defense system, which is oddly incapable of killing anyone who is trained in gymnastics, especially when one of them has had her feet replaced by another set of hands. There is an excruciating moment when Sithandra lands from an improbable leap on blades of grass, literally blades, a visual pun that gives the movie what is perhaps its only humorous moment until the ending. Heavy gourds apparently growing in trees open up to spray a storm of bullets that would easily kill anyone who is merely walking or running through the gardens in front of the fortress but is helpless to harm anyone doing a continuous sequence of handsprings. (Remember this – it could be handy if you are ever in a war zone or trying to escape from Guantanamo Bay.) Within the fortress the ruling oligarchs are dividing, on the surface over the methods used against rebels. Below, the age old questions rule; status quo versus change, ambition versus loyalty. Trevor Goodchild, played by Martin Csokas, is not happy with the way his Utopia is going while his brother Oren, played by Johnny Lee Miller, is content to continue to rule a never changing community – except for one thing, he would not be unhappy to see his brother deposed from the leadership. Csokas provides the movie with its one human character. Despite a hint of Godlike omniscience manifest as male power he makes the role work as the most human characterization in the film at the same time. As a leader he struggles with policies he no longer fully supports. As a man he is a rock, implacably challenging the dangerous Aeon to awakening but, as a man in another sense, he is completely vulnerable to the beautiful assassin he is involved with. He is the superb mind that found the cure for lethal pandemic and founded the city, becoming a leader for four hundred years and growing in strength and character. Aeon flux is a quiet movie. The dialogue is sparse and the dozens of people who are killed die without a murmur. Aeon kills by shooting, kicking, hitting and stabbing and never lets her victims squeak to alert others. This establishes a coldness in her character that conflicts with the director’s attempt to bring another personality to the surface. Charlize Theron is a good actress but this is not one of her good roles. She appears in this movie as an amazing body. Some plastic store dummies I have seen have more expression. She was unable to perform the magic of conveying inner conflict in the key scene where she stood gun raised, about to shoot … and Trevor spoke one word and she did not shoot. Neither did she find the subtlety to reveal the grief behind the mask when her sister died. All we saw was the mask.The goodies fight with the baddies and there are no points for guessing who is left standing at the end. In a final visual pun, the gene bank which drifted constantly above Bregna like a big-headed tadpole with long silken tails twisting behind it, crashes through the wall of this cell-like city and we all know what happens when tadpole like things crash through the walls of cells.