Aeon Flux - yet another attempt to capitalize on a cult classic and bring it to a mass audience.

I will state right now that I was never some devoted fan of the original shorts of "Aeon Flux" that aired during MTV's "Liquid TV," I can't even recall watching more than small fragments of random shows once it became a series, hell I was 11 years old at the time the series came out. What I do know, from what I saw at the time, was the show was basically a collage of weird, fetish sex and violence contained within a comic book/anime cartoon form. When I heard this was being made into a movie my first thought was "Oh cool, maybe I'll finally get to see what all the fuss was about when it was originally on television."

Then I found out it was live action.

Then I found out Charlize Theron was cast to play the part of Aeon Flux.

I decided that it still might be an entertaining action movie, and hell, Charlize Theron is pretty fun to look at and from the looks of the old cartoon the outfits she'll be wearing will make it more fun to look at her.

I don't know who gave Karyn Kusama the "OK" to direct this, but whoever did dropped the ball BIG TIME. In the original shorts and series Aeon was an incredibly thin, twig-like woman with crazy black hair wearing skin tight out fits that barely covered her naughty bits. In the film, Aeon is an average woman with short black hair that wears a giant spandex outfit that covers nearly everything up, removing the whole idea from sex that was a basis of the original series. To make up for Aeon not being a spindly, spider-esque woman, Ms. Kusama decided it would be a good idea to spend a half hour of shots that consisted of nothing more than Ms. Theron jumping around and trying to show how flexible she was, however, all of these were done with some terrible special effects that left me totally unimpressed.

Then the violence. Being rated PG-13 I wasn't expecting much, but what I got was even less. There was almost no blood and very few deaths removing another of the foundational elements from the original series. I expected Aeon to be a bad ass assassin able to wail on guys and pull off some awesome kung fu type moves, and instead the fights were simple, generic, and quite frankly boring. I fell asleep halfway through the movie, woke up, then had to force myself to finish the film. Maybe it's because recently I watched "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and the fights in there still give me chills, but this film left me totally unimpressed.

The plot was absolutely straight-forward, predictable, and direct, there wasn't a point in the film where I felt that the film was adding anything new that I hadn't seen before. The love story was incredibly bland, I felt no sympathy for Aeon, Trevor, the resistance, or anyone else. The film felt like a half-assed attempt to cash in on the audience of the original, which it failed to do. Budget: $55,000,000 Gross-to-date: $20,000,000

One of the things this film had been praised for was it's beautiful cinematography and style. Based on the facts that there was a $55,000,000 budget and the world already drawn for you, however, this film left me totally unimpressed.

I didn't find this movie satisfying as a simple sci-fi movie and especially not as an action film. Frankly, I would've rather sat at home and stared at a picture of Charlize Theron on the internet.