Aeon Flux: the movie and the original animated series
Went to see the movie Aeon Flux yesterday with owlfish. Enjoyable in a non-taxing, non-pushing any genre or narrative boundaries way. But really not very much like the original (quite apart from the extreme stylisation of AF's look in the original, probably not achievable with a human body), except for the names of the characters and places, the general look of things, and the action of some specific scenes. Oh yes, and Sithandra's hands for feet.
The original was non-linear, surreal, weird, bizarre. (And I really must watch my tapes again, which I would have liked to have done beforehand but didn't have time.) The first AF series consisted of short violent action cartoons with no dialogue which all ended with her being killed (the cloning theme in movie might provided a retcon for this, but the original intention didn't seem to require any rational explanation). The longer narrative episodes could be watched in any order, because they don't link together in any meaningful way (as far as I can see: for all I know other fans may have made connections I haven't), they start from scratch each time. And some of them are really, really, really, strange. There was a cool detachment about the tone.
Plus, moral ambiguity is the name of the game. There's no obvious Good vs Evil going on, it's never exactly clear if we should be rooting for AF as against Trevor Goodchild, except because she is so extremely cool. The movie lost the dominatrix element, turned Una (who in the original was or had been or was going to be AF's lover, it was strongly implied) into AF's sister (though there was a strong hint of something between AF and Sithandra...), gave TG a conniving brother (Oran: there was a character in the original called, appropriately since he was pretty much a w*nker, Onan, but I don't think he was any relation to TG and in one episode was working with, or trying to contact, the Monican underground).
The AF/TG relationship is, on one level, more like Tom and Jerry than anything else: they are antagonists who need one another, who are bound by a mutual obsession that does, in the series, become overtly erotic upon occasion (the movie romanticises this). It's the ongoing dialetical struggle between binaries: good/evil, light/dark, order/chaos, Batman/Joker... etc. They can never either utterly defeat one another or form a stable synthesis.
I can see that it would be very difficult, probably impossible, to make a big-budget Hollywood movie of this without linearising the plot and rendering the deliberately incoherent, coherent. And some of it I'm not sure would work at all in live action.
So I would consider this a fun-enough movie but a rather different pleasure from the original.
And I would need to look at the spin-off comic book The Herodotus Files again in order to make any comment on how that ties in.