Begins with “S” and Rhymes with Flux
Charlize Theron’s New Sci-Fi Bomb Ends Her Hot Streak

One of the more disturbing cinematic trends over the past decade is the apparent need for serious dramatic actresses to prove themselves in the action-adventure genre. We’ll call this condition Angelina Jolie Envy (AJE). Jolie won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for 1999’s Girl Interrupted and then promptly moved to a successful career as a human comic book character in films like Tomb Raider II and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.

Charlize Theron is stalked by a New Wave band from the early 80s (The Police? The Romantics?) in the new science fiction film Aeon Flux.

Recent victims of AJE include Halle Berry who went from winning the Best Actress Oscar for Monster’s Ball to stinking up the joint in the abysmal Catwoman and Julianne Moore who followed a great dramatic performance in The Shipping News with an attempt to fill Jodie Foster’s cheap leather shoes as FBI sleuth Clarice Starling in the disappointing Hannibal.

AJE is, as far as I can tell, a recent phenomenon. In the old days no one dared ask Katherine Hepburn to play Wonder Woman.

AJE has struck again. This time it is Oscar winner Charlize Theron who has stepped into an ill-advised action-adventure role in the new sci-fi dud Aeon Flux. In a year that has had some surprisingly decent sci-fi films (Serenity, Zathura, The Island), Aeon Flux is a painful lesson in how not to stir the imaginations of film fans who dig space, the future, robots and all that jazz.

A product of MTV Films, a company known for its emphasis on style over substance, Aeon Flux stars Theron in the title role, a kick-butt babe who lives in a sheltered portion of the earth 400 years in the future. In 2015, a virus swept across the earth and killed 99% of the population. When it was done, only a handful of humans survived under the leadership and control of scientific mastermind Trevor Goodchild (Martin Csokas). Everything seems copasetic until a group of rebels led by the mysterious Handler (Frances McDormand, another Oscar-winner out of her element) deems paradise a bit too dull for their liking. The group sends Aeon and another gal who has hands for feet (honest) to assassinate Goodchild, but their plot takes a turn when Aeon discovers he might not be such a bad guy after all.

Aeon Flux is based on an animated feature that I am guessing has its origins in Japanese anime cartoons. It is the most humorless genre of cartoons ever invented and this new feature film retains a gritty determination to never ever so much as grin. Even the martial arts scenes have a lack of playfulness that disappoints the viewer.

In the end, a movie that takes place in the year 2415 devolves into a barrage of bullets as machine guns take the stage and just about every secondary character is put out of his or her misery. You’d think that a film that is set this far in the future would have some novel ray guns with colorful Jacob’s Ladder-style lasers coming out and felling the bad guys. Nope. Just bullets and bombs. Think of the whole thing as The Matrix Lite and you’ll get a good idea of why it was made in the first place.

As the end of the year approaches, Aeon Flux is neck and neck with the comedy (their word, not mine) Kicking and Screaming as the Worst Movie of 2005. I would love to tell you that this stinker is not Theron’s fault, but at some point you have to blame actors and actresses for the roles they take. There must have been a point while Theron was reading the script for Aeon Flux when she realized it was no Monster, Cider House Rules or even North Country. That’s when AJE kicked in and Theron decided she needed a role where she could walk into Wal-Mart and see an action figure of herself in the toy department. Thank you Meryl Streep for never stooping to beat up a bunch of bad guys.

Hopefully Aeon Flux will be the last turkey of the year as studios trot out their potential Oscar winners during the last few weeks of 2005. Upcoming releases for the rest of the month include King Kong, The Chronicles of Narnia, Brokeback Mountain, Memoirs of a Geisha, Munich, The Producers and The New World.

Aeon Flux is rated PG-13 for sequences of violence and sexual content. It is currently playing at Regal Cinemas in Boone.