Post
by badi » Sun Feb 26, 2006 11:04 am
A E O N F L U X
WARNING!
DO NOT SEE THIS MOVIE!!!
Gentleman,
yesterday was my birthday, so Missus Badi said it's my choice which movie we'll gonna see in the cinema. Okay, there's not much on momentarily so the horny teenager in me decided for Aeon Flux, just out of curiosity. One of the more bad mistakes in my life.
First things first. The cast. Let's start with our most favourite Benoni farm Girl, Charlize. While otherwise I think she's a kinda good looking and talented actress she was badly miscast for this flick. To be honest, I had wished for a hotter, younger, more slender girl to play the title role. I guess she was casted cause the producers needed at least one big name for marketing of the movie. Ms. Theron's physical abilities are not that great, so all the fight scenes and stuff are heavily edited, fast cuts and so on. Nevertheless you can see that she can't even run properly.
Astonishingly the rest of the no-name cast are all doing quite decent jobs, particularly Marton Csokas as Trvor Goodchild. Pete Postlethwaite is criminally underused in his small role as "the keeper", as well as Frances McDormand as "handler".
Okay, production values are very disappointing. The CGI just sucks on a mid-nineties level. All the sets look as if they filmed in pavillons of a world expo, a hypermodern high school or something like that. Cheap! Particularly the over and over use of the same senseless concrete structures is speaking volumes about the cheapness of this movie. From the names in the cast and title roll it looks like they shot somewhere behind the iron curtain to save costs - and it looks every inch like that! The actions scenes do suck big time, a lot of stupid shootings and that's it.
The camera was not too bad but there wasn't one visual thrilling eye-candy shot. All outside shooting shows us more or less grey skies and again reveals that this is a cheapo production. Dialogues were shot in true soap-opera style, which is a shame since this movie is dialogue driven.
The director (anybody ever heard of a certain Karyn Kusama? Also sounds behind-the-curtain-ish in my ears) was not doing very well too. At first the Goodchild clan remembered me of a kinda shakespearean clan but then they turned out to be just a bunch of halfwits stuck on cheesy dialogues and filmed without any glory.
Overall there was no sense of wonder, no hint of greatness, no real drama. As my wife said: "I couldn't give a shit about the tragedy of all these people dying. I just didn't care." That's right on the money. There are a lot of things I can forgive if a movie is at least delivering a good story, worth telling. But Aeon Flux failed in nearly every single aspect of film-making. Badly delivered boredom!
Okay, let's hope UV and Underworld II are turning out better.
If at first you don't succeed,
then skydiving definitely isn't for you.
