Aeon flux complete animated collection series#

Aeon flux complete animated collection series#

But extended into 30-minute episodes, which one expects were required by MTV to contain plot in some shape or form, the series feels at once infinitely more mysterious and far too revealing it's as if they adopted the aesthetic philosophy of Aeon's barely-there costume - revealing everything, showing nothing - as the guiding principle of the series, and created such an indelibly eccentric and impenetrable world that there's nothing left to the viewer's imagination. The charm of the original material was its sense of futility - that a woman could triumph over all 1 million of her adversaries but fail to notice a nail stuck in her boot - not to mention its exuberant fetishism. But does Aeon really need a full-fledged series, much less a character arc or definable conflicts, in order to be engaging? While the series definitely has some interesting ideas about political and social reform (again, not all of which make complete sense), the overall intent of this meticulous plotting seems to expand the original idea - a hot chick lays waste to the universe before dying brutally - from compelling short to moderately-interesting but completely incomprehensible to a marketable, episodic length. The first three episodes had me at a complete loss for character or plot, despite the fact that almost all of the conversations between characters seem to be directly built for function rather than form: Aeon, her sometime lover-adversary Trevor Goodchild and all remaining characters are founts of expository dialogue, or at least I think it's expository, since otherwise it's just tech-speak gibberish.

Looking at the actual series, represented here in ten remastered episodes augmented by featurettes and commentary tracks, I also learned almost nothing new - and not in that great, thrill-ride kind of way, either. But searching amidst the images for an answer to my long-burning query what the hell is this all about, I discovered I had no better idea now, fourteen years after its initial appearance, than I did when the pretty pictures themselves were enough to satiate me. In the former capacity, I was satisfied thoroughly: the original shorts are beautifully rendered, violent adventures in which plot and character are never as important as the visual poetry created in its innovative directing and unconventional editing. As a devoted fan of almost all of Liquid Television and the original Aeon Flux shorts in particular, I was excited to go back and revisit Peter Chung's creation for both a bit of nostalgic reflection and, perhaps, an explanation or two for its mysterious pleasures. But even validated in three dimensions by actress Theron and her Girlfight director Kusama, does the series necessarily survive beyond the decades-old hype, much less make enough sense for common-denominator audiences to decipher the show's cryptic secrets? Evidenced by the dearth of revelatory details on The Complete Animated Collection DVD, I'm not so sure. Subsequently, Aeon Flux enjoyed a brief season unto itself on MTV that earned it critical accolades but little commercial attention - save for the ultimate inevitability of a big-screen remake.