Aeon Flux

More like Aeon Sucks!  High five, anyone...?

I love movies that are set in the future.  They often tell us what will happen to us soon, or maybe even in the recent past.  For instance, I bet you forgot all about the huge gang wars that divided the city of Los Angeles in 1997, to the point where gangs had minor fiefdoms.  Well, just watch Predator 2 and catch the history lesson.  Aeon Flux may be set in the far future, but it references a disease that wipes out 99% of the Earth's population in 2011.  So...nice knowing you, I guess.  Suck it, Mayans, you were off by a year!

The year is 2415 and all human life is within the contained city of Bregna.  Of course it is.  And just as obvious is the fact that life in Bregna is pretty perfect.  Except for the fact that it is under a benign totalitarian rule, with Trevor Goodchild (Marton Csokas) as the leader.  Oh yeah, and people have bad dreams.  That's a bummer.  Speaking of bummers, some people in Bregna just disappear, without a trace.  Bad dreams and disappearances lead to unrest, and the underground movement against the Goodchild regime is called the Monicans.  Aeon (Charlize Theron) is a Monican assassin, assigned by The Handler (Frances McDormand) to kill Trevor Goodchild.  The job is tough, but Aeon does a bunch of physically impossible things (while not breaking a sweat) and eventually reaches Trevor...but cannot pull the trigger.  Somehow, she knows him; even more disturbing, Trevor knows Aeon, and calls her Katherine for some reason.  Sensing that something is wrong with her mission --- and her understanding of Bregna --- Aeon escapes and vows to uncover the one secret about Bregna that will explain everything.

Sadly, this lawn crawling is part of the best action scene in the movie.

You may recall the anime series of the same name that Aeon Flux is based on.  Or not.  It was weird, obtuse, and was guaranteed to leave a new viewer completely confused.  The characters didn't speak any languages, they were either quiet or they made weird noises.  There wasn't really a plot, but there was a whole bunch of interesting things to look at.  With that in mind, I assume Aeon Flux's screenwriters had carte blanche when putting together this plot, and yet they came up with a pretty terrible story.  I don't want to spoil the twist in the plot, but it's pretty basic sci-fi stuff and it's not handled with either intelligence or ingenuity.  It's not all the story, though.  For a movie with so many random and weird futuristic things, like killer lawns and hands where your feet should be (to be fair, that was just one character), a lot of Bregna was very reminiscent of the 20th century.  Do you wonder what fashion will look like in 400 years?  For most people, exactly the same as today; that makes sense, because normal dress today closely resembles that of 1611.  The only people that wore unusual clothes were the abnormally hot, like Charlize Theron.

Why is she wearing boob drapes to bed?

Sure, I could pick on the science behind the story, but that factors into the big twist.  I do wonder how any of these people became more or less superhuman.  That's not really explained or even mentioned.  And some of the stuff is really weird.  Take the scene where Aeon catches a fly with her eyelashes.  Um...awesome?  What is that supposed to show me?  That she needs to wash her eyes now?  I don't get it.  I also don't get how Aeon and her friends are such efficient assassins.  Since the only army in Bregna is the one that protects the government, shouldn't the list of crack shots in the city be pretty well-known?  For that matter, I would think that, with so few humans left, the impossibly gifted ones would be relatively well known.  And yet, Aeon (who the two heads of the government both recognize on sight) lives an anonymous life?  I am willing to turn off my brain to certain things when watching dumb movies, but don't mix stupid action movies with pseudo-science fiction. 

I will give director Karyn Kusama credit for making a visually interesting movie.  It doesn't look very realistic and often looks like it's in Technicolor TM, but I don't know if she was going for plausibility, so I won't knock her for that.  Does this movie stay true to the television series?  Not particularly, from what I can recall, but I'm okay with that.  If you are a big fan of the show, you should know that there was no way in hell that a comprehensible live action movie could be made from it; while this takes several liberties with the source material, I think it did the best that could be expected.  In other words, I don't know why they wanted to make this movie, but it came out as good as it should have.  In still other words, any reliance on the original material guaranteed an incomprehensible product, and this movie should never have gotten beyond the planning stage.

But it was made, and actual actors signed up to star in it.  After a couple of serious dramas with critical acclaim, Charlize Theron was apparently tired of looking less than supermodely, so she took this role.  At least, that's the only reason I can think of for an Academy Award winner to agree to this tripe.  Her acting was decently mediocre, and probably better than the script demanded, but she still didn't do anything special.  I would put her work in this movie on par with her commercial work.

"Gold is cold"? What, is she writing the lyrics to Goldfinger?  That's okay, though; she just had to act to the standards of her co-stars.  You may remember Marton Csokas as the villain from Kangaroo Jack and xXx, and if that doesn't give you a hint about his acting talents, I don't know what will.  Jonny Lee Miller is just about as accomplished an actor as Csokas, but he plays a pretty annoying villain here.  I was also disappointed in Sophie Okonedo (the lady with hands for her feet) --- she's better than this.  Speaking of disappointment, what the hell was Frances McDormand doing in this movie?

Helena Bonham Carter looks great!

Pete Postlethwaite popping up for a bit part I am willing to accept, but McDormand is a genuinely fantastic actress.  Did she hear that this movie already had a slumming Academy Award nominee (Okonedo) and winner (Theron) and figured that no other film has had so much underachieving female talent in it?

[Side note: drop a comment if you can think of a movie as bad or worse than Aeon Flux with this many Oscar-worthy actresses in it.]

For this film to have worked on any dramatic level whatsoever, it needed to, at the very least, shown the populace being genuinely disturbed by their bad dreams.  Those dreams are a symptom of the city's horrible secret, and just mentioning that people have bad dreams doesn't justify assassination or toppling governments.  For this movie to work on an action movie level, it needed better action scenes.  That's pretty basic.  For this movie to work as a science fiction film, it needed more convincing science and fiction.  When I think about Aeon Flux, I am left thinking of a killer lawn.

And that's a pretty lame scene to sum up a movie.

Hotel Rwanda

I borrowed this DVD from a friend when the movie first came out, intent on watching Don Cheadle's acclaimed performance.  I never got around to it.  I always looked at the film as inevitably depressing, and I didn't know much about the Rwandan genocide of 1994, and I always feel sketchy if I let a movie educate me on world events.  In the intervening years, I've educated myself to a point where, when I saw the movie available On Demand through my cable, I finally felt I was ready to watch it.

The movie takes place during the genocide, but thankfully is not a document of the killings.  Instead, it tells the tale of Paul (Don Cheadle), a manager for the finest hotel around.  Paul is very talented at using words to get what he wants; when that fails, bribery usually does the trick.  This serves him well as manager, allowing him to get his hands on high end cigars, liquor, and more.  These treats are not for him, but to gain favor with local politicians, international military leaders, and anyone else.  It's a good thing he is good at his job, because ethnic tensions in Rwanda reach their boiling point, with paramilitary groups of the Hutu ethnic majority gathering and executing any of the Tutsi minority they can find.  Paul is Hutu, but his wife (Sophie Okonedo) is Tutsi.  Seeing his neighborhood quickly becoming a war zone, Paul manages to sneak and bribe his family's way into the hotel.  There, he tries to keep things business-as-usual.  It doesn't really work.  First of all, a war was going on, just outside the hotel.  Secondly, it's the old any-port-in-a-storm rule.  The hotel quickly acts as a shelter for overflow from the United Nations camps, the Red Cross, and for war orphans.  Why don't the Hutu militias just attack the hotel?  Good question.  The answer seems to be because Paul maintains the image of a professional European hotel; it feels like another country, or at least an embassy.  That means that, if the locals attack, there could possibly be some retaliation from the Western world.  Seeing the importance of maintaining this image, Paul must keep the hotel running for appearances' sake, care for the refugees, and act as the support for his own family.  For a while, Paul has his hopes set on the United Nations sending in a peacekeeping force to stop the massacre, but that never happens.  The burden for saving the 1200+ refugees in his hotel ultimately falls on Paul's shoulders.

This is an important movie to watch.  Hearing the abstract numbers (about 800,000 dead in an area about the size of a New England state) doesn't really sink in.  Seeing people being shot in the streets is more effective.  Showing trucks drive over miles of road, clogged with dead bodies is better still.  This movie doesn't set out to over-horrify you, which is good.  This is an exhausting viewing experience, and I say that in the best way possible; at the time of this genocide, Americans were either upset over Kurt Cobain's suicide, or fascinated by OJ Simpson's car chase in a white Ford Bronco.  Sure, those are obviously important things, but I have no recollection of Rwanda from school or news at that time, and that embarrasses me.  Still, this could have easily become a testament to the horrific things humans do to each other, but director and co-writer Terry George wisely chose to avoid making this movie an unwatchable guilt trip.  Instead, we have these terrible things framing a true story of heroic humanitarianism.

I was surprised that this movie did not show off the director or cinematographer's skills more.  Usually, when directors make an "important" movie, they make sure to show their skills or make things a little artsy.  This movie is shot in a straightforward fashion, with no artistic embellishments.

The film clearly focuses on Cheadle's character, but there are several recognizable actors with supporting roles.  Nick Nolte plays a Canadian UN military forces member, and he delivers the best white-versus-black speech I have heard in a long while.  Joaquin Phoenix is a news cameraman that asks many questions about the Hutu and the Tutsi for the benefits of the viewers; since his character is essentially there for exposition, his role is less impressive.  Jean Reno makes a brief, uncredited cameo just for recognition purposes.  Cara Seymour is the Red Cross worker that helps Paul save refugees; she's not in the movie much, but I thought she did a pretty good job.  Sophie Okonedo plays Paul's wife, and it is a demanding performance; she basically spends the whole movie terrified.

As I mentioned earlier, though, the real acting burden belongs to Don Cheadle.  It's rare to see a movie about death and destruction where the hero is not a man of action.  There are several points where Cheadle's character reaches a breaking point, and you watch him crumble in private, only to put himself back together in front of others.  It's fairly common for a low-key drama to have a nuanced grieving performance given by the lead actor or actress; this movie is not low-key, but Cheadle is still able to channel that same sort of private, subtle performance here.  There are two great scenes in particular that show this off.  The first is when he tells his wife to kill herself and their kids if the hotel is invaded; this could have easily been overacted, but his control here made his loss of control later all the more effective.  The second scene is just Cheadle cleaning himself up after unwittingly stumbling upon thousands of fresh corpses.  Cheadle has always been pretty good, but this role really showed what he is capable of.

Despite Cheadle's performance, this isn't a movie I will ever watch over and over again.  That's probably not the point of this movie, I get that, but it should be a little better.  Joaquin Phoenix's character is a little too guilt-ridden and a little too clueless to not be offensive.  I understand that Americans don't know what Hutus and Tutsis are; I think a short prologue would have worked better than having a stupid American make obvious comments about how he can't tell the difference between the two groups (there's a racist joke there, but I'm passing it by).  I think it's funny that Nick Nolte's character expressed his guilt more creatively and accurately (basically, the West sees Africa as a crap pile) as a Canadian than Phoenix's American could.  I also would have enjoyed a little more time spent adding symbolism and the like to make this a little more technically interesting.  I'm not saying the movie needed a Schindler's List red jacket, but a few little touches would have been nice.  Other than that, though, this is an interesting subject with one excellent performance.