In 2011, a disease will strike the world, killing 99 percent of the population. A vaccine is produced and only 5 million people are saved. The 5 million remaining group together to live in a utopian city called Bregna. That gives you six more years to party it up before you get sucked into the confusing world of "Aeon Flux."
The movie then skips ahead about 400 years. The regime that's been ruling this perfect society has turned evil, kidnapping random citizens who are never to be seen again. A secret society, the Monicans, has decided to go against this awful group and overthrow them. Aeon Flux (Charlize Theron), the top assassin, is sent to knock off the leader, Trevor Goodchild (Marton Csokas). It gets a little personal when the government kills her sister.
Flux then, of course, manages to battle her way through a bunch of bodyguards, gets through all the security measures, finds the government leader and has a gun pointed to his head. However, this is only 30 minutes into the film. The real dilemma is how the filmmakers will find a way to drag it out for another hour to make it an acceptable length for a movie.
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Aeon Flux can't understand why she can't bring herself to kill him, and neither can anyone else. So the filmmakers decide to bring a little romance into the equation. After that, she can't kill him because she has a feeling he's not the one behind all of the trouble. Since she doesn't kill him, he then confesses the whole story to her. The vaccine may have saved all the people, but it also made them sterile. For 400 years, they've been taking everyone's DNA and recycling it, essentially re-cloning everyone over and over again.
The disappearing people were apparently not taken for evil purposes but to be experimented on to see if they could get pregnant and reproduce people the normal way. It turns out Trevor's brother is the real villain because he wants to live forever by getting himself cloned rather than get the reproduction problem fixed! Oh no!
Apparently being a clone sucks away all of your emotions. The acting falls flat. It comes off as almost robotic, and the reading of even the occasional witty line is completely monotone. Maybe that's it; Theron didn't really make this movie. She wouldn't actually say yes to this, and those sly Hollywood men used a robot of her to fill in the role. Boy, she going to be pissed when she sees what they've done.
The fight scenes are the only somewhat redeeming part. It's interesting to know that if Theron's acting career fails, she could do a pretty good job as a gymnast. The fight choreographers had a number of different ways for her to bend all over the place, to scale up walls and to kill off numerous security guards. Let's just say if you're a world leader, you should be scared.
The movie also lost what made the short-lived "Aeon Flux" memorable as a cartoon show. The show was well-loved for its feeling and trippy imagery. This got lost along the way, in an attempt to break it down into a movie, because they tried too hard to make the movie look futuristic and edgy. It lost its creativity and originality, which is what caused MTV to take two-minute animated shorts to a full-out series in the first place. All you get out of the movie creatively is abstract geometric shapes, because in the future, that's how we're all going to decorate. Isn't that a little scary?
The Oscar buzz surrounding Theron for "North Country" is justified. Let's just hope those judges don't get a look at "Aeon Flux" before they start picking the winner. Let's hope you don't get a look either because "Aeon Flux" definitely doesn't deserve it.