When I first found about a live action version of the cult cartoon ‘Aeon Flux‘ I was all for seeing it. I even blogged in here. However, after hearing that the film was not screened for critics I have a strong feeling that this is going to be an instant crapper of a film. Other things support this too, like the fact that the star Charlize Theron is going to be dressed more like Trinity than the character she is playing. That bites. Second, in an interview with Peter Chung (the original creator of the character, the shorts on MTV’s Liquid Television and the cartoon series that aired on the same network) he said that he had little to do with the movie and wasn’t all that happy about the story being set in a definite time frame. He also said that the stylistic design of his world was better suited to animation than the big screen. (I wish I could find the link to this interview – I’ll post it when I do. For now you can read this one. )
I’m going to go out on a (short) limb and say that this movie will suffer from the same thing that kills any movie that has been ‘re-envisioned’ by a director. The universe will be changed, the look will be altered, the characters will act differently so it’s going to be a movie with things just loosely based on the original. For fans of the old series it’s going to be a big let down and for people that have never seen the original it’s just going to look like a Hong Kong action flick that has a chick that looks like she was taken out of the Matrix. Yawn.
For those that have no idea what the heck I’m talking about when I say that the original rocked in a special ‘kinky-leather-BSDM-kill-an-army-with-one-clip’ sort of way go read this. Think of it as your homework before you go to the movies this weekend.
CulturePulp 041: The Not-So-Secret History of ‘Aeon Flux’?
