Aeon Flux

Director: Karyn Kusama

Year: 2005

Cast

Charlize Theron – Æon Flux

Marton Csokas – Trevor Goodchild

Jonny Lee Miller – Oren Goodchild

Sophie Okonedo – Sithandra

Frances McDormand – Handler

Pete Postlethwaite – Keeper

Amelia Warner – Una Flux

MY SUMMARY

Æon Flux is set in the city of Bregna, a walled city-state where the 5 million or so human survivors of a global pandemic live. The heroine of the film, Æon Flux (Charlize Theron), is a Monican, a rebel group fighting Bregna’s government. While on a mission, Bregna police kills Æon’s sister, Una (Amelia Warner), mistaking her for a Monican. This enrages Æon and makes her more determined to kill Bregna’s leader, the scientist Trevor Goodchild (Marton Csokas).

In the course of her mission Æon discovers that she, like the other Monicans, were being manipulated to bring down Trevor from power and prevent Bregna’s inhabitants from really “living.” As it turned out, the antidote that saved the people from the disease made them infertile. To make sure that humanity will survive, Trevor had everyone cloned (their memories inadvertently cloned too) until he finds a cure to their sterility. Trevor’s brother, Oren Goodchild (Jonny Lee Miller), disapproves of finding a cure, enjoying the apparent immortality of living in cloned bodies. Oren is actually the manipulator of the Monicans and destroys Trevor’s research. Upon declaring Trevor as a traitor, Oren assumes power in the city.

Oren later admitted that the people were cured of the infertility by themselves but had them killed out of fear. Æon turns against Oren and convinces other Monicans to do the same, killing him. To make sure that cloning will end, Æon destroys the Relical, a floating repository of everyone’s DNA and crashes it against Bregna’s walls. The people of Bregna are finally liberated from their cycle of cloning and their isolation inside the city walls.

SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY & SOCIETY IN THE FILM

Æon Flux is similar to the film The Island. Bregna, analogous to the Merrick facility in The Island, is a man-made refuge against a world-wide pandemic that kills almost all of the human population. Bregna’s government is an authoritarian technocracy living on deceit, similar to the scientist-administrators in The Island. However, unlike The Island, the threat in Æon Flux is real. Outside the walls of Bregna lies a different world, a world hospitable to all except humans.

Æon Flux is more about the issues of cloning and the survival of the human race. In the story, the treatment that rendered the people safe from a deadly pandemic made them sterile. To ensure that mankind will survive (until the infertility riddle is solved), the scientists of Bregna resorts to cloning, in vitro fertilization and transplantation of fetuses into unknowing mothers, faking pregnancies. By doing this, not only is DNA is recycled but also thoughts. Æon Flux showcases many “thought technologies” other than the concept of memories becoming encoded in the DNA; a metallic pill enables people to communicate telepathically, everyone’s thoughts are monitored, and mental messages can be ingested through some sort of drug. Body modifications and tissue technologies (instant skin grafts) are likewise very fantastic and too good to be true given our current scientific achievements.

Cloning and the recycling of thoughts (and, on a more philosophical level, consciousness) rendered the 5 million or so individuals of Bregna “immortal.” This is the central issue of the plot. For Æon and Trevor, man isn’t meant to live forever.

Aside from the unbelievable technologies in the film, the Japanese-inspired minimalism of the whole setting (architecture, fashion, landscaping) is hard not to notice.