Went to the cinema yesterday for to see the fillum Aeon Flux. I enjoyed it, but it did demonstrate the gulf between being enjoyable and being particularly good.

It was shot in Europe which probably explains the many Brits in the cast: Jonny Lee Miller, Oscar nominee Sophie Okenedo (off of Scream of the Shalka), Pete Postlethwaite, and the ubiquitous Paterson Joseph (Johnson in Peep Show and Rodrick in Bad Wolf/The Parting of the Ways). The eponymous character was played by Oscar winner Charlize Theron. Sadly, despite her Academy Award, her flat performance was one of the reasons the film wasn’t as good as it should have been.

Some things were slightly excusable because they presumably came from the source material. The action scenes occasionally overstayed their welcome, but that’s to be expected from an adaptation from Manga. The plot twist was a terrible sci-fi cliché – so much so that it was used in an episode from the second series of Star Trek: TNG. (I only remeber it was second season because Dr Palaski was in it and it was a unintentionally funny episode.) This particularly twist involved a significant suspension of disbelief from anyone with a scientific bent – fair enough if the conceit is presented at the beginning of the film, but harder to accept as a twist introduced two-thirds of the way through.

The film took itself terribly seriously – I can’t remember a moment of humour in it. One scene, which should have been very powerful, involved a group of guards being disarmed by a speech from one of the protagonists. Unfortunately, the script didn’t remotely reach the level of rhetoric required to pull this off and it was therefore unconvincing.

I don’t want to be too down on it tough – I did enjoy the film and it didn’t commit the ultimate sin of being boring.