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Aeon Flux— |
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Review by A.L. Sirois
eon Flux started off as an interesting and very peculiar cartoon on MTV. Now it's been transmogrified into a feature film starring the appealing Charlize Theron. Theron is nice to look at, but the film is no improvement over its animated ancestor. Ah, well.
Composer Graeme Revell has provided an appropriately industrial electronica techno-pop sort of score for the film. It serves the flick well enough, and a couple of the cues are quite good taken out of that context, but overall the score hasn't got a whole lot to offer repeated listenings.
This may be because Revell had only about two weeks to pull the gig together. The assignment originally landed in the lap of Teddy Shapiro, then went to Reinhold Heil and Johnny Klimek. By the time Revell inherited it, he had what most people would regard as an unreasonably short time in which to deliver the goods. He's done this before—for Tomb Raider—but the whole problem with showing that one can write an entire score in two weeks may well mean that Certain Idiotic Movie People may well assume that one can do that at will. So Revell got hoist by his own petard. Which means it's not really fair to expect much out of such a quick turnaround.
Not bad ... for two weeks
It should come as no surprise that, stylistically, Aeon Flux is a lot like Tomb Raider: lots of electronics, lots of drum loops and that stuttering CD-skip thing. He also throws in some cellos and solo vocals. These work best in the cue titled "Torture Garden," which also gets increasingly industrial as it goes along.
A swirl of strings and thudding drums introduce Earth's last city in "Bregna 2415," the opening cue. There's that skipping-CD thing again. It's all sort of vague and swoony until about two-thirds of the way through, when the cue shakes off the dust, eschews the piano and gets down to some serious butt-kicking electronica that should please the MTV-ers. Until then it's a typical languid "vision of the dystopian future" thing.
This reviewer likes the industrial stuff, but there could be lots more here. Listening to the entire CD gives the impression of haste in the composition and execution—Revell certainly has chops, and there is nothing sloppy here, but no one can produce really great work under unreal time restraints. He could probably have pulled off a really good score of industrial stuff, given time. And access to some choice Suzanne Vega cuts off her truly great 99.9 album for inspiration. (Think "Fat Man and Dancing Girl" or "99.9 Degrees Fahrenheit".)
Come to think of it, that's probably what is missing here—a smattering of melody. Really, the score is as forbidding as Bregna. The one time the whole thing takes off like a rocket is in the very last cue, "Aeon Flux." A psychedelic opening leads into a really nice Pink Floyd-y rock segment with an appealing Asian feel to it. What's not to like? Well, it could be longer, for one thing! But thankfully there are some real drums to listen to, as opposed to all those damn patches.
You know me, I'm always looking for nice stuff in the accompanying booklet. Not much here for the money, just some nice shots of Theron looking like she's doing yoga stretches, a cheesecake shot or two, plus some pix of other people from the film. I dunno, other people may like Aeon Flux more than I do, but I can't see it as anything more than somewhat above average. But don't believe me, go check the film reviews. — Al
Science Fiction Weekly
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