8/31/2023 0 Comments Aeon flux anime dvd![]() ![]() Hell, any one of the Liquid TV shorts sported deeper characterization in the space of two or three minutes without a single line of dialogue. The movie lifts some ideas from Chung's series but doesn't manage to do anything all that interesting with 'em, and the sticky depravity that defined the animated Æon is sorely missed. Even though I like this sort of oddity, it's not as consistently far out there as the animated series, and this smaller dollop of strangeness in the context of a fairly conventional action movie doesn't really work. I appreciated a lot of the "hey, wouldn't it be kinda cool if.?" visual flair, such as a surveillance system consisting of a giant pool of water revealing events present and past, no matter how impractical it may be. The costume and set design overall are fairly impressive in that '64 World's Fair Futurama sort of way (in the future, everything is curved), although McDormand is borderline-unrecognizable with her orange Bride of Frankenstein coiff, and the digital and live-action elements often don't blend together particularly convincingly. At least Æon Flux is kind enough to drape Theron, for my money the most drop-dead gorgeous woman on the planet, in form-fitting, occasionally barely-there outfits. The performances are devoid of emotion all around, really just a series of flat, stilted, expository line readings wrapped around CGI and awkward wire stunts. The movie squanders a gifted cast that includes the likes of Charlize Theron, Pete Postlethwaite, and Frances McDormand. Once Trevor and Æon get entangled, the action becomes a lot more routine, consisting of standard issue running, punching, kicking, acrobatic leaping, and shooting. Another memorable sequence has Æon and Goodchild's chief thug teleporting back and forth in a battle royale. In another assault, Æon and a vaguely simian sidekick with hands for feet struggle with the organic security surrounding the perimeter of the compound, including razor-edged blades of grass and hanging fruit that blast needles at intruders. ![]() When she hesitates to take the killing shot and is imprisoned, Æon whistles, those discs turn to orbs, follow the sound of her voice, and detonate. As Æon skulks around Goodchild's fortress, she sprinkles small metallic discs across the ground. Around half of the movie features some intriguingly off-the-wall action, although you've already caught the highlights in the trailer. No matter how skin-tight her costumes are, she always manages to have a canister of Bat Shark Repellant stowed away in there somewhere to deus ex machina her way out. Æon Flux doesn't establish a set of rules for its world at the beginning, and whenever Æon gets in a scrape, the movie without fail invents some out-of-left-field way to get her out. It's too self-serious and pretentious for viewers who want a mindless popcorn action flick and too vapid, incoherent, and arbitrary for those aching for something substantial. As a movie, I'm kind of consciously aware that it's lousy, but as a train wreck, there's something strangely fascinating about Æon Flux. The stale "so bad, it's good" cliche doesn't really apply it's so bad that it goes past good, circles back to bad, and winds up someplace completely unrecognizable. Æon Flux is pretty damn far out there, kind of a cross between a third year art student's acid trip and masturbatory fan-fiction from a Buffy the Vampire Slayer LiveJournal. The truth she uncovers threatens the survival of the human race, pitting her against both the regime of the status quo and her former Monican comrades. When her sister (the almost-as-lovely Amelia Warner) is gunned down under suspicion of working as a subversive Monican spy, Æon sets out to exact her vengeance but soon discovers that Trevor isn't the fascist, genocidal murderer the Monicans have claimed. There are those who oppose the rule of Trevor Goodchild (Melba t.I mean, Marton Csokas), a dynasty that has endured for the past four centuries, and assassin Æon Flux (Charlize Theron) has been dispatched to bring his reign to an end. The five million survivors live in the walled-in city of Bregna, which is either Utopia or a sprawling prison, depending on who you ask. Æon Flux is set in the far-flung future, hundreds of years after a devastating virus decimated virtually all of the world's population. Paramount knew they'd come up a cropper and avoided screening the film for critics when it plodded into theaters last year, and.yeah, it doesn't take long to see why. A live-action bastardization of Peter Chung's animated series for MTV, Æon Flux has the clunky dialogue and the ".the hell were they thinking?" charm of a Sci-Fi Original Movie *, only with a $60 million budget and an Oscar-winning asskicker in the lead. ![]()
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