Aeon Flux

The trailer for this film caught me: stark primary colors, surreal futurist imagery, Charlize Theron in black leather. The film has a faint déjà vu quality--echoes of Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury as rendered by Truffaut back in 1966. The blimp seems straight out of Blade Runner (1982).

Apparently this film is based on a comic book. Its portentous premise is that in 2011 a virus wiped out 99% of the human population. A group of scientists kept the human race alive by developing a vaccine which rendered sterile everyone vaccinated. The scientists who invented the vaccine develop a technique for cloning people when they die so that the human race can perpetuate itself. Seven or so generations have passed since the viral near-annihilation of humanity. Women are beginning to disappear for unknown reasons. The government has become more interested in preserving power than in sustaining humankind. It’s a totalitarian state that surreptitiously surveys every detail of the lives of its citizens and marks for liquidation those who pose a danger. But one scientist is having doubts. There is a group of rebels . . .

So it goes. The story is tangled, twisty, and devoid of imagination. It’s something we’ve seen a hundred times before. (Most recently, in The Island, but a few years before in The Matrix). The philosophy is the sort you encounter in one of the lesser episodes of Star Trek. The images and actors are new, or almost new, and from the first scene you can write the plot without actually sitting through the film.

Even the visuals, which attracted me in the first place, disappoint.