Reviews of Æon Flux (1991) and related work
- Remake: Æon Flux (2005)
Æon Flux (1991
)
In the far future, a mysterious woman aligned with the polity of Monica frequently finds the same man implicated at the core of her enigmatic tasks: her archist arch-enemy and fetishist lover.
Progressive SF, first running on MTV’s Liquid Television block, then becoming independent in 1995. In a 1996 essay for Film Comment, reprinted in Ghosts in the Machine, Michael Atkinson put Æon Flux next to Twin Peaks (1990), Wild Palms (1993), The X-Files (1993), The Maxx (1995) and a handful of other shows in the “Pynchonian ground zero” of 1990s TV, “where the anxious engines of alternate universes are fueled by an unshakeable sense of technophobia, dislocation and powerlessness”. Æon Flux, in particular, was apparently intended both to mock and to offer an alternative to traditional Aristotelian dramaturgy. Exposition is kept to a bare minimum, sometimes less, leaving much of the environment and plot in the dark. Causality and morality are cloudy. Alien music and peculiar design work create a very unusual atmosphere, where the heroine fails and dies as often as not. However, much of the character and world design is unappealing, the grotesque humour of more typical American “adult” cartoons exists here as well, and there is very little overarching plot.
References here: Blame (2003).
Japanese production animation fiction moving picture series