So, after birthday dinner for my brother on Tuesday, Kat & I decided to spend some quality time together and go see a movie. Being that it was after 8pm and we were confined to Burnaby for transportation reasons, our options were fairly limited. We managed to narrow it down to "Pride & Prejudice" (her choice) and "Aeon Flux" (my choice). Being that we both had to get up early the next day we opted for "Aeon Flux" since it was playing earlier and despite all of the warning signs I still wanted to see it. Maybe the critics were wrong I thought. It's happened before. Women directing sci-fi is rare enough, how could this not be at least worth a look? And I like Charlize Theron. I think she's a great actress as well as being very beautiful. And Jonny Lee Miller is in it. That must be worth something?
So, I knew that they'd cancelled the press screenings. Not usually a good sign. Then we got to the theatre and bought our tickets. Rated PG. PG!!!!!! The "Aeon Flux" movie is rated PG!! Again, this should have been a huge clue. But no, we wandered blissfully into the theatre, ready to prove the neigh sayers wrong with our superior understanding of cinema. Or at least I did. At about the 10 minute mark, after the second of two scenes that could have been the intro to the film (actually, it should have been the intro & they could have excised the first 5 minutes altogether) I realized that we had a very long 90 minutes ahead of us. Which isn't to say there weren't glimpses of hope. There were some good concepts (messages carried in psychic pills, genetically modified plant weapons) and the whole thing generally looked quite good. However, as Kat pointed out, the whole thing should have looked AMAZING! Instead, they gave Aeon a dead sister to look all misty-eyed about and a subplot about the fight to conceive babies naturally. Yes, they were trying very hard to make it a chick flick, but with ass-kicking. Which is all fine and good, but it never came together. The emotional scenes seemed heavy handed and it was all just poorly put together that I really had to stretch to care enough to make it to the end of the movie. Charlize at least tried, and she made a pretty convincing assassin, but making Aeon emotionally vulnerable right from the get go was a big mistake. And I have to blame the director. The movie had real potential, but instead decided to coast on standard sci-fi cliches while shoehorning girl-power rhetoric into what should have been a brutally violent style piece.
Oh, and Jonny Lee Miller's looking a little puffy these days.
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