In Defense of the "Aeon Flux" Film

I was a big fan of Peter Chung's short animated features on MTV's "Liquid Television" that he called "Aeon Flux." There was very little dialogue, a whole lot of action, and the recurring death of the main character, Aeon Flux herself, a busty/leggy femme fatale, in every single short episode. Peter Chung has described it as aggressively anti-continuous, and deliberately so.

After the success of "Beavis and Butthead", another "Liquid Television"-launched program, MTV thought that there might be legs in the action cartoon with that chick, Aeon Flux.

Then Peter Chung had to flush out a world and create a continuity and a storyline for an entity that wasn't supposed to have anything like that, for an exercise in blowing off steam for an animator that worked primarily on "Rugrats". A structured Aeon Flux project is a corruption of a purely action/anti-continuity series of short features.

That being said, the show did have an interesting premise, storyline, characters, and plotting devices, and mostly entertained the fans of the original short features, at least those who stuck around and watched them all (honestly, I'm not included in that group).

So, years later, they decide to make a live action feature film of Aeon Flux, starring Charlize Theron, and the fans were aghast, or at least held the entire project in contempt. It opened to poor reviews, and closed soon after.

I recently saw the film, and watched some of the special features on the dvd copy that I'm borrowing. One thing I thought that was totally lost on any prospective fan of the film was that the movie wasn't ever supposed to be a strict storyline from the cartoon, but was constructed to exist in conjunction with the Aeon Flux world. It was always meant to be a companion piece, not a live-action retelling of some of the cartoons. That misperception could have been the fault of the marketing department.

If you know nothing about the animated shorts and later the animated series, and you watch the film, what you get is a rare humanist sci-fi film, and what's more, an actually serviceable sci-fi film. It's not totally horrible. Calling it great would be a stretch, but serviceable? Sure. It's a rare thing when you get a humanist, futuristic-clone storyline, where weapons and the technological innovations are all along organic lines of progression.

Plus, the locations in the film were all found in and around Berlin, and are marvelous at least. Seeing the film and realizing how few scenes are in a sound-stage, how many wild and crazy locations they found to imitate a planned and created futuristic city will blow your mind.

Like my brother Dan told me before seeing "Avatar", "If you leave your science hat at home, you'll be entertained," I think that if viewers leave behind their love and knowledge of the animated Aeon Flux universe, and watch the film with an open mind, they probably won't hate what they see.