Aeons go by, as do opportunities to make a fresh, different film.
And we wonder why no one goes to the movies. It's not that there's anything wrong, exactly, with
Aeon Flux
, but there's also nothing particularly right about it, either. Have directors and writers become so fearful that they won't hold studios hostage? Are actors so afraid of unemployment that they won't walk off the set? If no one else is gutsy enough to call it, audiences will; the emperor, in point of fact, has no clothes.
***image1***Or maybe that's just Charlize Theron. Fans of the short-lived MTV series of the same name will be familiar with the secret agent's taste in clothing (or lack of same): Victorian-Japanese fetishwear made, as far as one can tell, of black dental floss, medical gauze and strategically placed raisins.
Aeon
's sets are also futuristically appointed, especially certain sculpted cement exteriors which look for all the world like the south bank of the Thames, only set in a future with such technological innovations as transparent concrete and razor-tipped grass.
There must be more to filmmaking than interior design, though, or we'd be giving Best Director to Martha Stewart for arranging dried lavender in rusty paint cans. For example, one also needs plot holes through which our heroine can turn a half-dozen backflips. In the series, Aeon Flux was an acrobatic operative for the nation of Monica; she often was required to go up against her sadistic lover, Trevor Goodchild, mad-scientist leader of neighboring Bregna. In the absence of Monica, it's hard to explain Monicans, who are apparently disgruntled with the Bregnan technocracy for disappearing people à la Chilean dictatorship. In a walled city-state of five million (the remaining population after a virus-cough
bird flu
cough-has ravaged humanity), it's even more puzzling that the disappeared, the disappearers and/or the cryptoanarchists don't stand out, especially when the latter do everything in their power to look like runway models at a Halloween sex party.
At any rate, this incarnation of Aeon (Ms. Theron, with that architectural hair we'll all be required to sport in 400 years) is assigned by the Monicans' ephemeral Handler (Frances McDormand, whose hair resembles nothing so much as an unravelling orange bathmat) to assassinate Trevor, whom she knows only as the man who cured the "Industrial Disease." Armed with her platform wedges and black spandex, she's prepared to carry out her assignment but is halted in her tracks when Trevor seems to recognize her, and she him. The plot thickens, but not sufficiently; it's more like pancake batter when you've accidentally added too much water to thin it.
Theron and
Girlfight
director Kusama make heroic efforts to render Aeon cartoonish, giving her a low, flat-pitched voice, a tendency to stare obliquely into middle distance and a personal grudge against Bregna; but the oddly avuncular Marton Csokas doesn't seem to have received any direction at all-at any rate, he's about as threatening and evil-seeming as Joe Lieberman (strange, given how he torched up the screen with Natasha Richardson this summer in
Asylum
). Even such normally charming British actors as Jonny Lee Miller and Pete Postlethwaite are ruthlessly flattened, not into stylization but two-dimensionality.
***image2***Animator Peter Chung's original shorts inevitably ended with Aeon's death, and then casually began again next time as if nothing had happened; if only someone had thought to make a feature-length film every bit as cryptic. We could have had a self-referential
Memento
-esque episodic drama in which Aeon and Trevor were repeatedly slain and only gradually came to realize what was happening. Instead of referencing animé, why not make a live-action film that
is
animé, in which the absence of dialogue seems deliberate rather than a product of the screenwriters' doltishness, in which there's more to tragic romance than one violent death in an orchard of cherry blossoms, in which dominance and submission are expressions of more than costuming, in which we're not stuck with yet another vanilla soft-focus flesh-toned camera-pans-to-the-window hetero sex scene? There's an art to asking and failing to answer the right number of questions, and
Aeon Flux
clears up too much of the mystery; afraid of going too far, it doesn't risk enough, and the result is just another pretty but pedestrian sci-fi/action movie.