Review: Aeon Flux (2005)

Director: Karyn Kusama

Starring: Charlize Theron, Martin Csokas, Jonny Lee Miller

Website: www.aeonflux.com

Why are some people allowed to make movies? Can’t we have some kind of a test or a license needed to do it? Can’t we just make it so certain individuals just can’t make movies or put them out for the public to see? I know that seems…incredibly fascist and dictator-like, but really, in the interest of common decency, we should really consider it. I’m not naming any names though. No sir, I’m definitely not naming Karyn Kusama or her second film Aeon Flux.

I mean, man, this is a piece of shit. I haven’t seen a more wretched, unholy projection of vomit onto film in a long time; it might as well be called ‘Incompetence: The Motion Picture.’ I don’t even have to make many jokes about it; the jokes are made for me by the movie itself. Just look at the pictures here for proof. It’s just such an inept, horribly written movie on every level that the only way to improve it would be to go back in time and completely erase it from the historical canon, wiping it out without a trace. But unfortunately it exists, so why don’t we take a look at what makes Aeon Flux such a terrible mess:

Our movie starts off with some words over a black screen that are typed in the Arial font from Microsoft Word, like they couldn’t even be assed to get a better looking one, detailing the back story of the film. Apparently in 2011…weird year to choose…the world was overtaken by a deadly virus that kills off most of humanity until they are saved by a scientist named Goodchild, who then proceeded to completely take over the world for the next 400 years. But – wait for it – there are rebels fighting against him now. Gasp! Rebels fighting against an overbearing tyrannical government? Who would’ve guessed? That’s such a radical idea my puny brain can barely handle it. Never mind why it took 400 years for anyone to start fighting back. I guess they were just waiting for the right moment! That’s really great. No, seriously, why the hell is that rebel fighting treated like such a fucking surprise? You’re in a goddamn dystopian future, you bungholes; this kind of thing should be like an every-day occurrence to you!

We’re introduced to our main character named Aeon Flux, played by Charlize Theron, who wakes up right as a bug is caught in her eyelashes – why do I get the idea this small, disgusting annoyance is in some way symbolic of the movie? Anyway, she narrates some more about things that the opening already kind of established, saying that she is one of the rebels, who go by some name I can’t understand, so I won’t bother even putting it in this review. They’re just rebels. That’s all they need to be called. So she walks around the city as the only person wearing a black trench coat with a weird veil over her face, somehow not calling attention to herself even though she’s clearly not like everyone else. For a fascist government that has been around 400 years, they sure don’t recognize dissenters to their cause easily, do they?

Then this weird thing happens where she gets called in her mind to some kind of chamber where an old woman with red hair gives her orders…she says that she has to ‘blind’ the government so they can't track them or something, even though if they could be tracked I'm sure the government would have gotten rid of them by now, and so…I guess Flux does exactly that. It’s not even that big of a spectacle apparently, given how she seems to accomplish this in a relatively short amount of time. She just goes into this weird circular chamber with water dripping from the ceiling, kicks something in and then gets out of there. But apparently not fast enough for her sister to be killed off so quickly that we don’t even get to know anything about her.

This of course throws Aeon into despair, although you wouldn’t know it from her consistent monotone that makes it impossible to relate to her in any way. She sits around in her house…turns water from its colorless normal state to black for some reason…and then she gets sucked back into her own mind again. She’s told to cheer up by the red-headed lady again before this happens for no reason:

Seriously, what the hell is up with these visuals? They’re never explained, never make any sense and they just detract from the storytelli…oh, wait.

So now Aeon has to kill the leader of the city named Trevor. The only explanation given for why these rebels didn’t do this earlier is that they “didn’t have the information they needed.” No light is shed on what information this was, or why it took them this long to find it. We’re just supposed to believe that they’re only just NOW trying to kill this guy for the first time. Sure. Aeon meets up with her friend Sithandra, who…okay, I can’t even type it out without feeling stupid; just look:

She has hands where her feet should be. I can’t even believe you’re expecting me to take that seriously; hands where her feet should be. That’s so STUPID I can’t even handle it! Every scene she’s in, completely robbed of tension and seriousness. She says that it’s useful and that Aeon should consider having the operation too. Why the hell would you even want to have hands where your feet should be? I'm not even going to dignify this by going into the numerous impracticalities of it in every-day life; it just looks fucking ridiculous. Gah! It’s like something a drunk science fiction writer would make up while writing a satire of science fiction, not something that would be featured in any serious story. It’s totally ridiculous. "And then the girl with hands for feet picked up the gun with her foot and tossed it to her partner. Then she scratched the blister on her ankle with her other foot. Ooh!" Insert weed binge here. What’s next, a character with ears for hands? Maybe a guy with three noses? Why not, I ask you? Why the hell not? Ooh, in the realm of Aeon Flux, anything is possible! Anything at all! Oooooh! Ugh.

So…after that we get our two femme fatales doing cartwheels, jumping over shit and avoiding machines that shoot razor-sharp grass blades at them? Seriously, the grass hurts them now. I couldn’t even make this shit up if I tried. I guess doing the yard-work for this evil fortress is a real killer, huh? Aeon goes in alone, confronts Trevor, but for some reason can’t bring herself to attack. He knocks her out and locks her up in a glass prison, but that’s just a front for more special effects masturbation as she escapes:

Uh...

Wait...what?

HUH?!

I mean honestly. Is it that hard to make just a little bit of sense? I’ve never seen more pointless, self-indulgent and superfluous use of special effects. They’re not even trying! They’re just…throwing in whatever the hell they want, expecting us to buy it. It’s the biggest mind-rape ever, all these completely random CGI images thrown at us for no reason. They don’t even know what they’re doing. It’s like the work of a mentally retarded child trying to use a CGI animating process. It’s completely insipid.

Through a highly confusing and vague train of plot-attempts involving a drugged out sex scene and a tiny machine that makes a hole in the floor leading to a hidden library/scientific lab when you touch it the right way (…yeah), we get some more scraps of “story.” Basically what I think the film is trying to get across is that mankind has been infertile for the 400 years since the virus was cured, and that the only way they’ve been having children and reproducing is through cloning dead people and ‘reincarnating’ them into the wombs of women through some pill in their drinks or something. This is how Trevor and his brother, who is also part of the government, have been alive ever since.

…well that’s stupid. Nobody ever noticed this going on, what with how some very prominent and well known people kept being reincarnated? There was never any uncovering of any of this during that whole entire 400 year regime? That’s pushing it movie, it really is. Seriously, THIS IS AWFUL. I am actually literally embarrassed to sit here and watch this movie, even dignify it for one minute with my attention. It's such a stupid plot that I'm almost sure what happened was that they spent all their money making the eye-raping special effect wonders and then threw together a plot at the last second. Doesn't it just seem like that? The kind of...phoned-in, thrown-together mess of a plot that didn't even have a real writer so much as one of the studio janitor's high school science fiction stories written in Algebra class? It's just about as insufficient. TRY THINKING ABOUT IT MORE, YOU GIBBERING APES. I mean this is seriously the bottom of the barrel, people. The absolute in wretched fecal matter. I am in total awe.

Oh, and apparently Aeon is actually Trevor’s old lover reincarnated without full memory of it. Could the movie get any more clichéd and brainless? Well, the filmmakers asked themselves that question and they'll be damned if they didn't try! How about we have Aeon’s old rebel buddies turn on her because she didn’t kill Trevor and have that freak with hands for feet come to her personally and confront her, leading to a fight? How about a clumsy big battle scene with explosions and guns that finally leads to a cheery, happy ending where all the oppressed people look toward a brighter future? GOD, what a bad movie!

It’s especially hilarious how they actually try to shoehorn in a generic theme about how people have lost their humanity with the cloning stuff going on. Hah, that’s a laugh. Talking about humanity in a movie where the characters amount to little more than crayon drawings by a kindergartener; that is rich. These characters are so whitewashed of any kind of emotional texture that it’s practically a miracle of bad writing – try and name any distinguishing characteristic of any of these characters beyond ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ and I’ll forfeit this review and admit that I was wrong about this entire thing. Just try.

Nothing? Well, color me un-surprised. This movie is just awful. It’s one of those movies that makes you feel dirtier and dumber the longer you sit there and try to watch it. The storyline is ridiculous, the special effects are ludicrous and the movie as a whole is just one horrible pile of I-don't-want-to-know-what after another, with no reprieve until the credits start rolling. Aeon Flux sucks ass! There's nothing about this that is in any way redeeming and I'd rather eat a bag of nails than watch it again. Hey Karyn Kusama, want to make a good movie next time? Just don’t even try to tell a story. Put Charlize Theron in an even skimpier outfit and have her do cartwheels and show off her body for 90 minutes. That would at least be more entertaining than this. As it is, I would rather have that virus destroy humanity than have a future with this many plot holes! That would be good riddance.

That's more like it.

Review: Scott Pilgrim vs The World (2010)

Director: Edgar Wright

Starring: Michael Cera, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Ellen Wong, Jason Schwartzman

Website: www.scottpilgrimthemovie.com/

"You're pretentious, this club sucks, I have beef. Let's fight."

-Scott Pilgrim

I am so out of loop with popular culture. What the hell is Scott Pilgrim? Who is he? I was first introduced to this franchise by seeing the commercial for the movie when I was watching The Big Bang Theory. It looked like an interesting enough plot – a kid has to fight his girlfriend’s seven evil exes to date her and keep her. I didn’t know if it’d be good, bad, whatever…but it piqued my interest. So I figured I would go see it in the theaters when it finally came out. And what’s my take?

I…think my mind was just blown when I saw this. It was so crazy and so over the top that I had no idea what to make of it. Starring the apparently infamous Michael Cera, this weird little action/romance story is told in a highly strange and stylized fashion. When a new scene starts, they often pop up a little black comic-book-esque box by them with white text explaining some facts about them, often humorously. Scenes vary wildly in length, some lasting five minutes and others less than one. The movie likes to parody video games and use terminology and clichés from them to further the story – in one scene, the hero decides to stand up for himself and fight for himself over anyone else, and as he flaunts his newfound power, the words “Scott gained the power of self respect!” are narrated in a deep voice and flash on the screen in blinking neon.

See? I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like this. This movie is completely original. Well…except for the comic it’s based on, but shut up, I know what I’m talking about in this review!

Even the writing is completely off the wall. In the first few scenes, the titular Scott Pilgrim (Cera) has a conversation with his band (made up of a token regular guy named Stephen, a stoic, monotone redheaded chick named Kim and a guy named Young Neil, who is not in the band, but just lives at the house they play in) about inviting his new “fake high school girlfriend” Knives into the house while they play. They’re really concerned that she’ll break up their nerd-dom and not be able to handle it. The dialogue is so winding and so convoluted with things that would just be otherwise retarded or ridiculous. Like when Ramona says “I was just a little bi-curious,” the enemy character replies “Well, I’m just a little bi-FURIOUS!” That line is so horrible that I’d want to smack whoever wrote it. But in this movie, I’ll buy it. I really will.

I will now go through some of the exceptionally noteworthy scenes in this movie:

There’s one scene where Scott beats a Vegan opponent by making him drink milk, I think it was, that turns out to violate the ‘Vegan Police’ code, getting him stripped of his ‘Vegan powers.’ I couldn’t make this up, people. There’s the all-time special effects wonder of the world when Scott and his band face off against the dastardly and short-lived threat of the Kazayanagi brothers, resulting in a chaotic explosion of shining beast-like holograms, neon lights and multi-colored fire that will make your eyes bleed with how cool it is. And there’s one scene near the end when Scott has to fight his ‘negative self’ for some reason that nobody really cares about, because it’s awesome either way. It cuts away to Ramona and Knives outside when Scott walks out with his ‘negative-self’, joking and laughing like old friends. Scott says that his negative self is a really nice guy.

See? I love the comedy in this movie. It’s so innocuous and so dorky that it becomes absolutely side-splitting when it’s at its best. It’s just great, it really is.

The acting is good. People will bash on Michael Cera whenever they get the chance, but he does a really good job here. His delivery is hilarious and his facial expressions are always really funny with how naïve they are. I’m not familiar with a lot of his movies, but he does good here. I can tell you that. Mary Winstead as love interest Ramona is wonderful, as she is good looking and versatile – funny when the movie calls for it and also soft and vulnerable or cold as ice whenever needed, too. Kieran Culkin and Anna Kendrick bring up the backbone along with the delightful Alison Pil as Kim. And the seven exes are always over the top and fun, too.

So, detractors from the score? Well, I was amazed with how far up its own ass it could get when it really tries. That Vegan Police scene I mentioned above was about where the line was crossed, although it was already flirting with that when a girl’s hair highlights are literally punched out. These scenes are still enjoyable in their own way, but I can’t help but feel that the film kind of winds up in its own special effects and nerd-isms at times. But maybe that’s part of the appeal.

This film should in all respects suck a whole lot. But it works. It really works, in one of the most oddball fashions ever. All the film’s extravagances and eccentricities are done with a hefty sense of irony, but in the same way, even the irony is ironic, like they’re ribbing the kinds of snot-nosed indie films of this usual sort, in a good natured way. There’s also a ton of homage to video games and video game culture, as well as to anime and comic culture, too. It’s a delightful hodge-podge of influences that, combined with the film’s crazy exuberance, really makes an entertaining watch. The characters are delightful, the humor is spot on, the action is wondrous and the plot is a ton of fun. Scott Pilgrim is a winner. Revel in its supreme nerdery.