Aeon Flux

Written 6 March 2006

Warning: This film review reveals most of the plot of the movie.

I'll never understand anyone can mess up a movie which stars such as great actress as Charlize Theron. She's gorgeous, she can really act, and she does excellent action shots. Yet whoever created this movie thoroughly botched the job. It's definitely one for the worst of the worst list. It's so bad I wouldn't even recommend it just to see Charlize.

The trailer makes the movie look awesome - this is one of those films were literally all of the good scenes are in the promo. I admit I should have known better, since the movie was not submitted to the reviewers before it opened. That's almost always a bad sign.

Okay, so what's it all about? Humanity has been devastated by a disease which makes people sterile. A "cure" is created and the remaining survivors of the human race take refuge in one city. That's all that remains, is a single city full of people.

Some of those people are disappearing under mysterious circumstances. In fact, our heroine, Aeon Flux, looses her sister at the start of the movie. It's not so mysterious, though, since she is shot and the body is carried away.

Aeon is ordered to penetrate the defenses of the government and assassinate the leader. The gyrations of her friend (who has had hands surgically grafted on her feet) and Aeon to get past these defenses are one of the few good scenes in the movie. These defenses are pretty good, and Aeon almost dies. But they make it into the complex and Aeon gets to the person she is to kill. But she cannot pull the trigger, and for some silly reason is instantly in love with the dictator whom she was about to kill.

You see, he's actually a good guy. There is a plot against him by his brother, who is controlling the rebels somehow. So Aeon now turns against her friend with the strange feet, goes running all over trying to save the dictator and learns the "horrible" secret of humanity.

You see, no one, literally, survived the plague. All humans are now clones, and some really strange looking balloon holds the secret to it all.

Sigh. I wonder sometimes why so few comic books have been successfully converted to the big screen. I can count the successes on the fingers of one hand with some to spare: X-men and X-men 2 (many people would add the Spiderman movies to this list). That's it. Every other attempt has been lame, at best. Comic book stories do not make good movie scripts, as a rule, and the amount of money required to create a good comic-bsaed movie is horrendous (just look at what the X-men and Spiderman series cost).

There are lots and lots of action scenes, and Charlize looks pretty good in all of them. Unfortunately, a movie needs more than a good looking actress and some action scenes.

For this film, I wouldn't even recommend the rental once it comes out on DVD. Don't even waste your time.