Aeon Flux (2005)

Suggested remake title: Acid ReFlux

“Oh oh, looks like we’ve got a South African Creeping Charlize poking through the lawn. That’s an invasive species, better get the Round-Up.”

Aeon Flux (2005)
Director: Karyn Kusama
Writers: Phil Hay & Matt Manfredi, Peter Chung (Characters)

Science fiction films about dystopian futures are legally required to open in one of two ways: either a narrator tediously explains how the world ended, or—as in this case—the movie just texts you the back story.

“2011: A virus kills 99% of the world’s population.”  But since we’re still alive, we must be part of the 1%, so excuse me while I go build an elevator for my cars and off-shore some manufacturing jobs.

“A scientist, Trevor Goodchild, develops a cure.” But then he quits virology when he gets a better offer to appear as a Bond Girl.

“The five million survivors live in Bregna, the last city on earth.” As civic mottos go, “The Last City on Earth” is no “Gateway to the Salton Sea” or “Home of America’s First Wave Pool,” but it has its advantages. For instance, your baseball team is guaranteed to win every game against their traditional rivals, the Second to Last City on Earth, albeit by forfeit. Anyway, the Bregna Rotary Club meets Wednesdays at noon, Jaycees and Oddfellows on Fridays at the Holiday Inn Hospitality Ballroom.

“The Goodchild dynasty rules for 400 years” the credits continue.  So in the future if you develop a drug that everybody desperately needs, you get to become Pharaoh, which explains the near constant state of warfare that raged between the powerful Viagra and Rogaine dynasties.

“Rebels emerge to challenge the Goodchild regime.” They would have liked to have fought back four hundred years ago, but they had to wait for the emperor’s drug to go generic.

Cut to 2415. Aeon Flux (Charlize Theron) plucks a bluebottle fly out of her false eyelashes and breaks into voice over: “Some call Bregna the perfect society. Some call it the height of human civilization…”

Hey, no fair! We did the reading! Why do we have to sit through a lecture too? Do we have a substitute today?

Okay, fine. She goes on for awhile, so let me just sum up: Bregna is a Rose Bowl-shaped city in the middle of a jungle, and populated by white people in lounging pajamas.  We know it’s a totalitarian dictatorship, because anyone caught wearing a Doctor Who scarf is arrested on sight, but a group of rebels (called “The Monicas” after their favorite character from Friends) strike back by wearing vaguely fetishy black vinyl raincoats. When Aeon isn’t tweezing insects from her eyelids, she is one such rebel, and fights the power by strutting around town in thigh highs and a hoodie made out of a screen door.  She meets another Goth pedestrian and instantly they lock lips; we zoom inside their mouths like it’s a toothpaste commercial just as the male’s tongue pushes a ball bearing down her throat, and if your very specific kink is “Watching Charlize Theron imitate a Pachinko machine”, then you’re about to have a hap-hap-happy day. As Aeon’s stomach acids break down the ball bearing, we see that it contains a tiny Frances McDormand, who yells at her to go break into the Goodchild NSA and stop eating so many spicy foods.

Aeon has a boring conversation with her sister, then puts on her whitest suit for the burglary, does a compulsory gymnastics routine, and lowers herself into the nerve center of the Goodchild surveillance state, which turns out to be a gigantic talking toilet. She discovers that the snooping potty recorded the conversation with her sister, despite how boring it was, but manages to scrub the data using a high tech Clorox Toilet Wand. Then she flushes twice, because it’s gonna be a long movie.

Aeon heads off to dinner with her sister, who is in the midst of slicing up some extremely art directed fruit when she’s suddenly interrupted by two bullets in her face. Unlike the bluebottle fly, these prove more difficult to remove, so all Aeon can do is another voice over. “I had a family once. Now all I have is a mission.”  And an intestinal blockage in the shape of a four-time Academy Award Winner. It’s been a day.

As it happens, the talking polyp from Fargo has another assignment for Aeon: break into the Citadel and assassinate Chairman Goodchild (who appears to be the same guy who invented the virus cure four centuries ago, so apparently he’s immortal). At least, I think she’s supposed to kill him; the briefing is kind of vague, as it consists of McDormand regurgitating a flower, then blowing pollen into Aeon’s eyes. Which proves just what a bad-ass our heroine is: because not only can she do cartwheels and operate indoor plumbing, she also has a high threshold for seasonal allergens.

Frances warns Aeon that the “underground interior has been built to be confusing,” just like the plot, but gives her a schematic of the Citadel, and when I say “schematic” I mean “a rash on her forearm that looks like the New York City Subway map,” so just as long as Aeon doesn’t take Benadryl during the break-in, she should be fine.

Frances concludes by promising, “Do this, and you’ll have your revenge. And we’ll all have our victory.” The war will be over, and you’ll be able to poop me out like a tapeworm.

Aeon teams up with Sithandra, an exotic-looking black woman with hands for feet (but not feet for hands), and they run through a garden of brass ballcocks that shoot darts, but not very well. It’s not really the ballcocks’ fault, though, because the two women are doing relentless backflips, and as any action film fan knows, this makes you impossible to hit with a projectile, even if you backflip directly into the line of fire, as Aeon does.

Not just a backflipping super spy, Aeon also moonlights for the Bregna Department of Parks and Recreation as the superhero Turf Surfer, making scofflaws tremble at her battle cry, “KEEP OFF THE GRASS!”

She slips into the “underground interior”¹ and immediately starts getting turn-by-turn instructions from her ulna. She wanders around, scattering ball bearings about like some kind of cyborg Johnny Appleseed, before finally tracking Goodchild to the stage of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion where he’s practicing a speech in his pajamas.  Aeon walks up and points a gun in his face, giving Goodchild just enough time to decide he’ll ingratiate himself to St. Peter by opening with a joke (“This morning I was shot by a girl in my pajamas. How she got in my pajamas I’ll never know.”)  Then he calls her “Catherine,” which makes Aeon look frozen and panicky, as though she’s forgotten her line, and while she’s standing there waiting for the script girl to prompt her, one of the other characters gets bored and hits her in the head.

Aeon wakes up in a cell, but fortunately she has an eye dropper hidden in her platform heels. It doesn’t do anything, but fiddling around with it seems to pass the time until her posse of ball bearings stage a jailbreak.

In a big twist nobody cares about it, we learn that Aeon and the rebels are being manipulated, and the person who actually arranged for the assassination of Goodchild was his own brother, Spoiledchild.

Aeon and Goodchild meet in secret so she can give him lip about having her sister murdered, and then they can have PG-13 quality sex.  The next morning she wakes up with a startled gasp, puts her knee on Goodchild’s throat and slowly chokes him to death while having psychotic flashbacks (this is why I don’t miss the dating scene).

Aeon finds a staircase and descends into the dark basement, I guess because every time she chokes out a one night stand she likes to treat herself to a watermelon rind pickle.  Goodchild’s bodyguard, Freya shows up and attacks Aeon with a minigun. Aeon fights back with a metallic crab spider that lets her teleport from the basement to another basement. As catfights go this one is short, weird, and inconclusive, but we do discover that Goodchild was only choked half to death. Meanwhile, Spoiledchild has taken over Rose Bowl City and ordered that Goodchild be arrested and executed for the crime of Mom liking him better.

Sithandra catches up to Aeon, bitches her out for only choking her victim enough to prolong orgasm, and then picks a catfight which is also short and dull, despite the fact that Sithandra has four hands, which should make her a formidable hand-to-hand combatant, but in reality just seems to make her better than average at dangling from a trellis. I suppose if they were playing Rochambeau she’d be unbeatable.

Later, Aeon climbs up a giant beanstalk and jumps onto a huge jellyfish that floats over the city like the Goodyear blimp. Inside, she finds Pete Postlethwaite dressed like a sandworm from Dune. (He quickly disappears, so I’m not sure if this is part of the movie, or if he just accidentally walked in front of the camera on his way to a Halloween party.) On the bright side, the Jellyfish computer tells Aeon that her sister isn’t dead, she’s just been turned into a baby. (Personally, if someone offered me a choice between death, or experiencing diaper rash and Gerber Strained Apricots again, I’d be Jetskiing across the River Styx so damn fast…)

Aeon finds Goodchild, who explains that he cured the virus but accidentally made humanity sterile, so he’s been secretly cloning everybody for the last four hundred years while he tries to cure that. The filmmakers, sensing we don’t really care, throw in lots of running and shooting and screaming and glass breaking and a nice ride on the Disneyland People Mover. Then Aeon and the wounded Goodchild take refuge in a sewer of the future, and he says, “We need to get the bullets out” so she reaches into his chest hole and plucks them with her fingertips as though she were an arcade claw machine and he was riddled with Minion dolls.

Pretending we still care about the plot, Goodchild reveals that he’s finally cured the infertility and Aeon’s sister was pregnant before she got recycled, so he has to get to his lab and find his notes before Spoiledchild destroys them. Oh, and six or seven clones ago Aeon was his wife, Catherine, which is why she’s spent the film alternately banging and half-murdering him, because she has a genetic memory of marriage.

Spoiledchild orders his henchchildren to mow down Aeon and Goodchild, when suddenly the Monicas arrive. Aeon springs into action and gets every single one of her friends killed. But she makes up for it by crashing the Jellyfish into the Rose Bowl and killing Pete Postlethwaite, which is very sad, not because he was a good character or had more than three lines of dialogue in the whole movie, but because when the costume designer showed him the Sand Worm suit, I bet he said, “I wouldn’t be caught dead in that!”

The end.

Hoo boy. Okay, let’s dive in and see if there’s any sense we can salvage from this thing. I’m going to leave the plot alone, because it’s still smoking and sparking so bad I’m afraid to touch it.

So in the future there’s a plague that kills off 99% of humanity (and I assume the surviving 1% were the superrich One Percenters who could afford decent healthcare and whatever it costs to barricade oneself in a fortified jungle football stadium), which is bad. One scientist cures the plague, which is good, but makes the entire species infertile, basically finishing the plague’s job for it, which is bad. But he’s been secretly and nonconsensually cloning everybody for the past four centuries, which is…good? I don’t know…Honestly, this feels less like a motion picture and more like the world’s worst “Yes/And” improv game.

But you know what? Let’s just forget the plot; it’s got so many holes you’d be better off using it to grate cheese. I’ve worked on a couple of literary-to-screen adaptations, and it can’t have been easy for the filmmakers to translate an “avant-garde science fiction adventure animated television series” to the big screen, but it shouldn’t be this hard on the audience. Still, that’s what Better Living Through Bad Movies is all about: finding the silver lining in a fart cloud…

So we learned that in the future, nobody uses mobile phones to communicate anymore, they just email Frances McDormand back and forth with their tongues. Also, the trend toward organic and cruelty-free cosmetics has reached its logical conclusion, and now women achieve thick, rich, Covergirl lashes, not with mascara, but with flyspecks. (Granted, it seems a little cruel to the customer, but getting paid to shit in a human’s eye is probably a dream come true for a fly.)

Nowadays we worry about Google and Amazon and social media companies stealing our information and selling it, but in the future we’ll discover that’s a red herring because everyone is actually being surveilled by their toilets, which are spies for Big Bowl. Granted, I’m not sure how much actionable intelligence you’d get from bugging someone’s plumbing; I imagine the average conversation between analysts studying the doody data would go like:

“He’s still got that pimple on his left butt cheek I see. Does it look bigger? Maybe it’s an infected mole. He should get that checked out.”

“Yeah. Man, this guy’s body wastes a lot of corn…”

Ultimately, though, we learned that there is no theoretical limit to how many good actors a bad movie can waste (the two female leads have five Oscars between them), which is kind of sad. So I’m going to focus on the one character I liked, Sithandra, played by Sophie Okonedo (Oscar nominated for Hotel Rwanda). Lord knows Sithandra wasn’t a good character, but she wasn’t around much, which appealed to my fear of commitment, and when she was on screen she was usually yelling at Charlize, which frankly made made me feel seen, if not vindicated. So even though we watched her shed a single, poignant tear as Spoiledchild shot her in the face with a rocket launcher, I’m going to ignore her death the same way I ignored the scene where Charlize and Sithandra dressed and acted like argumentative nuns, while Frances played the Pope in a bright orange fright wig (in the future, the Holy Father is a woman and also Bozo). Instead, in my head canon she survived, left Bregna behind, and went on to become the World’s Most Ruthlessly Efficient Hand Model.

Sithandra for Gold Bond Healing Hand Creme with Aloe.

1. This raises the question, what’s an “Underground exterior”? A meteor impact crater? Good luck getting your employees enthusiastic about coming back to work in the office when the office is a live volcano. I frankly don’t know how these Bond villains do it.