Movie review: "Aeon Flux"
May. 6th, 2006 12:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
matrixrefugeeI'm taking a break from the MxO for a few days: that free trial has me a little rattled since I'm expecting more idiots to show up and cause more havoc than I can take right now. So... I rented a stack of DVDs to tide me over.
***1/2 out of *****
I can't decide if I like this movie or not. The cinematography is top-drawer, the acting is a little flat, and the script is all over the place.
The plot, such as there is, could have stood to be developed a little more than the film's 90 minutes allows, but that might have slowed down the pace and taken away some of it's odd charm: a plague has wiped out 90% of the human race and the survivors now live in a utopian city ruled by seemingly benevolent dictatorship. Aeon Flux (Charlize Theron), an assassin and member of an underground resistance movement, is sent to take down the head of the government, but then something small happens to cause her to question what's really going on in her world.
The film manages to follow it's own crazy logic, and it even makes a case for natural procreation and against cloning humans, even using as a major plot point a possibility that I had considered. Aeon's world is starting to unravel from within since cloning has, by necessity, replaced natural procreation and people are starting to suffer from an accumulation of memories from their "previous lives". I've had the theory that, considering the bond between each individual human person's body and soul, cloning might be potentially psychologically harmful to the child produced by cloning. Think about cases of heart transplant patients who started manifesting some of the quirks of the donor whose heart they received. A child produced by cloning very well could come into the world burdened with the memories of the person they were, for lack of a better word, copied from. Maybe it's crazy, but it's a possibility I don't want us to see made real.
I'm not familiar with the MTV animated series the movie was inspired by, but I am familiar with it's wierd, trippy style, by way of one of "The Animatrix: Matriculated", which shared the same creator, and I'm tempted to seek it out, just for a comparison, and because I've fallen in love that trippy look. The film manages to translate it quite well, from animation to live-action.
I'd be among the last to call it a great movie, but it's fun to watch. The lush, organic world it presents, with plants and gardens and water and sun-washed vistas (reminiscent of Peter Weir's "Gattaca", which also cast a cautionary but far more focused eye on the possible fallout caused by geneticly manipulating humans), alongside futuristic stonework, is something you don't see very often in science fiction. It's a post-apocalyptic film that manages to move beyond the "Bladerunner" conventions (dingy cities with perpetual acid rain storms and people huddled around fires in trash barrels); even the technology is integrated with nature, ala David Cronenberg without the feeling of moral contamination that seems to cling to his sci-fi films. It manages to bring you through a subtly dark world and out into the light again.
***1/2 out of *****
I can't decide if I like this movie or not. The cinematography is top-drawer, the acting is a little flat, and the script is all over the place.
The plot, such as there is, could have stood to be developed a little more than the film's 90 minutes allows, but that might have slowed down the pace and taken away some of it's odd charm: a plague has wiped out 90% of the human race and the survivors now live in a utopian city ruled by seemingly benevolent dictatorship. Aeon Flux (Charlize Theron), an assassin and member of an underground resistance movement, is sent to take down the head of the government, but then something small happens to cause her to question what's really going on in her world.
The film manages to follow it's own crazy logic, and it even makes a case for natural procreation and against cloning humans, even using as a major plot point a possibility that I had considered. Aeon's world is starting to unravel from within since cloning has, by necessity, replaced natural procreation and people are starting to suffer from an accumulation of memories from their "previous lives". I've had the theory that, considering the bond between each individual human person's body and soul, cloning might be potentially psychologically harmful to the child produced by cloning. Think about cases of heart transplant patients who started manifesting some of the quirks of the donor whose heart they received. A child produced by cloning very well could come into the world burdened with the memories of the person they were, for lack of a better word, copied from. Maybe it's crazy, but it's a possibility I don't want us to see made real.
I'm not familiar with the MTV animated series the movie was inspired by, but I am familiar with it's wierd, trippy style, by way of one of "The Animatrix: Matriculated", which shared the same creator, and I'm tempted to seek it out, just for a comparison, and because I've fallen in love that trippy look. The film manages to translate it quite well, from animation to live-action.
I'd be among the last to call it a great movie, but it's fun to watch. The lush, organic world it presents, with plants and gardens and water and sun-washed vistas (reminiscent of Peter Weir's "Gattaca", which also cast a cautionary but far more focused eye on the possible fallout caused by geneticly manipulating humans), alongside futuristic stonework, is something you don't see very often in science fiction. It's a post-apocalyptic film that manages to move beyond the "Bladerunner" conventions (dingy cities with perpetual acid rain storms and people huddled around fires in trash barrels); even the technology is integrated with nature, ala David Cronenberg without the feeling of moral contamination that seems to cling to his sci-fi films. It manages to bring you through a subtly dark world and out into the light again.
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Date: 2006-05-06 11:18 pm (UTC)