Right In The Middle

That’s my impression of the move Aeon Flux.

It’s a difficultl thing. I watched the Peter Chung’s original animated shorts and they always came off as brilliant, but positively loopy and entirely non-linear. Heck, the title character, Aeon herself, had a tendency to die a lot in these escapades only to return without explanation for another adventure that usually killed her off again. And let’s not forget the obscure dialogue; whenever Aeon or the other characters actually spoke to each other, it always seemed like this had been an ongoing series for years, and if you’d only just watched episode 22 of season 6 12 years ago (And by the way, that’s made up, the series didn’t last that long), that reference in the dialogue would have meant something, really.

It was one of the most unlikely of intellectual properties to bring to the silver screen and yet, somehow, Paramount decided to go ahead and turn this:

Into this:

And I really don’t have anything bad to say about it.

Or good, for that matter.

When it came time to actually turning such a bizarre animated concept into a movie, I, when I honestly thought about it, had no clue how to possibly even begin such a process. The animated character is an overwrought, fetishistic enigma that can contort herself into humanly impossible positions, and her relationships, alleigances and story itself were subject to constant change dependent on the needs of a particular episode. She lived up to her name in that regard, the series and the character itself were in a constant state of flux with no permanence or narrative reliability. When it came time to make the movie, it was clear that while they they kept the names intact, and some general characteristics (ie, Aeon Flux has dark hair and is a consummate acrobat and combatant) everything else was up for grabs.

In the end, it was a harmless diversion. One of the people I saw the movie with fell asleep 20 minutes into the film. I myself never felt particularly engaged or drawn into the characters, although I marveled at the art design. And from a photographic perspective it was a prettily shot movie. There were also some moments that had me cringing at how painful certain combat sequences looked, or marveling at how elegant some of the action/acrobatic sequences appeared, but, much like the original series itself, I found myself not particularly drawn to the story (Even though this time around, there actually WAS one) and sat back to simply soak in the spectacle. It was a harmless movie really, though not the kind of thing I’d be dying to add to my DVD collection, I might consider it once the price goes down as it makes for good visual reference material.