|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
— Ben Cosgrove, with additional reporting by Larry Carroll and James Montgomery
At a time when Hollywood's appreciation of originality seems to have dried up and blown away, leaving nothing but remakes and adaptations lamely scuffling for attention, a movie like "Aeon Flux" might, at first glance, seem like a bit more of the same.
After all, live-action movies adapted from animated sources like comic books are lined up for as far as the eye can see, and "Flux" — in theaters this December; (see exclusive, first-look photos here) — is, strictly speaking, just that: a live-action adaptation. And like a slew of other recent and upcoming films — "Honeymooners," "Bewitched," "Dukes of Hazzard" and on and on — it's also the big-screen debut of a story born and raised on TV.
But a closer look reveals a far more complex pedigree. Is "Aeon Flux" straight sci-fi? A superhero film? A cartoon-come-to-life? All (or none) of those things?
"I always felt like there was a complete disconnect between things that were fun and entertaining to watch and things that were more thoughtful and philosophical," says Peter Chung, the 44-year-old creator of the animated show (and its titular lead character) on which the movie is based. Refusing to pigeonhole his creation as action or sci-fi, thriller or drama, Chung insists that he "never understood why you couldn't have a James Bond movie that dealt with psychology and metaphysics. My description of my own agenda [for the 'Aeon Flux' television show] was 'James Bond directed by Ingmar Bergman.' "
That agenda was brought to startling life in the early- and mid-1990s on MTV's late-night cartoon stew, "Liquid Television," when Chung created not only the singularly sexy female assassin, Aeon Flux, but an entire futuristic utopia-in-serious-trouble in which she expertly plied her trade. In the upcoming film, Aeon is played by Charlize Theron, and in answer to the two key questions certain to emanate from the fanboy quadrant: yes, and yes — her short, jet-black hair and her skin-tight, jet-black bodysuit have made the transition from Chung's remarkable small-screen animation to the big-budget, live-action theatrical release with nary a change.
(Aware that Aeon's sleek, hyper-sexualized appearance is one of the elements of the original "Liquid Television" shows that viewers recollect most vividly, Chung offers a profoundly simple explanation for the look's origin: "When you have to animate a character and draw her hundreds of times, you want to come up with a design that's actually enjoyable to draw," he says. "You try to use as much of the body's expressive power as possible. That's why artists have traditionally preferred to draw the nude as opposed to the clothed figure, because you want to get the maximum amount of emotional expressiveness in your figure. I also wasn't sure if viewers would be interested in the kinds of stories I was trying to tell," he admits. "But I did know that if I could at least [draw viewers] based on her being fun to look at, then people would watch.")
The storyline of the film will be familiar to fans of the original show — Aeon, a cat-suited army of one, is bent upon assassinating Trevor Goodchild, leader of the council that rules the technocratic, post-apocalyptic walled city-state of Bregna and (not incidentally) the one man alive who fires Aeon's rockets. As Matt Manfredi, one of the film's two screenwriters, puts it, "These two characters that Peter created are such particular and weird and interesting people, and I really don't think we've seen [characters like them before]. Their relationship in such a very strange, love-hate connection, and that's what drives a lot of our story."
"Definitely," agrees Phil Hay, the film's co-writer. "I mean, it's like they're enemies, but they're crazily attracted to each other. Their relationship kind of had to be the center of any story we were going to tell, because of the shifting, very serious, very charged dynamic between the two of them. And Charlize and Martin Csokas [who plays Trevor] bring that dynamic to life in the film. It's not a soft, fluffy, romantic relationship. It's a really intense, interesting kind of take on a so-called romance."
Two strong-willed, accomplished, driven people who are attracted to one another despite seemingly insurmountable — in fact, lethal — differences in philosophy, outlook and ways of navigating the world? Sounds suspiciously sophisticated, doesn't it? One might even say it smacks of those rarest of themes in sci-fi and action films: genuine, grown-up sexuality and complex, adult emotions.
For Chung, creating an animated world that suggested and conveyed the lustful ambiguities and subterranean psychic violence that grown men and women often struggle with even in the best of times made "Aeon Flux" far more than a mere cartoon.
"It's a universal tendency in films to be more about sex and violence than the real world is," he argues. Asked if he thinks "Aeon Flux," the TV show, was more sexually charged than most people's personal lives, he readily admits that he just doesn't know.
"But I would pose the opposite question," he adds. "Why are so many characters that you see on TV so desexualized? A lot of them seem to be completely asexual — especially animated characters — and it implies that those characters are normal. The characters in 'Aeon Flux' are normal people who have normal sex lives and appetites."
But a healthy — or deviant, or puritanical, or sadistic, etc. — attitude toward sexuality, Chung points out, is only one aspect of an adult's makeup. How one approaches daily decisions, both great and small, also helps define us. And again, in this respect, he set out to create a fictional character with all the strengths and weaknesses of a flesh-and-blood human being — even if that human being also happens to be a lithe, iconoclastic, solitary killing machine.
"The thing about Aeon," he says, "is that she makes a lot of mistakes based on the fact that she's not willing to be guided by any kind of ideology. It was very important for me to create characters that weren't just the stereotypical black, white, good, evil stereotypes, and I think that's what makes it an adult show: the fact that the characters are ambiguous. People are like that in real life, and I can't imagine doing it any other way."
For Manfredi and Hay, the two screenwriters charged with the tricky task of transferring Chung's intimately personal vision from the small screen to a full-blown, big-budget Hollywood experience, those adult ambiguities were both signposts and hurdles.
"What Peter did with that show," Manfredi says, "and what he did with his animation was so unique that, in a sense, there was no way to make that into a live-action film. And so our goal, the whole time, was to make something that stands beside it, as a companion. The two visions complement each other."
"Peter came to visit us on the set," Hay says, "and he and I spent most of the day together just talking about the TV show and what he did with it, and what Matt and I have been doing, and what Karyn [Kusama, the director] was doing in terms of the look of the film, and I think we came to a really good understanding, a theory, of how to approach adapting something so unique. Peter's 'Aeon Flux' and ours don't replace each other — they're two similar works of art in different mediums. I think that all of us kind of look at it that way — that they can stand together and support each other."
Chung, meanwhile, doesn't shrink from pointing out the enjoyable irony of the entire endeavor.
"The idea of 'Liquid Television' was that it would be a satire or parody of things you see on television," he says. "The title, 'Liquid Television,' is kind of like the idea of a TV in a blender. 'Aeon Flux' was originally my parody of heroic action movies — and now there's a Hollywood action movie based on something that originally started out as a parody of Hollywood action movies."
"The reason I created the show," he continues, "is because it's the show I wanted to see myself. That may seem obvious, but it's actually not the most common attitude among people who work in the movie industry. Many people work on stuff that they have no interest in seeing themselves."
Ultimately, though, Chung's hopes for the movie have little to do with grand ideas about changing the way that people view their entertainment, or how neatly Manfredi, Hay and Kusama have meshed their vision of "Aeon" with his own.
"I want the movie to do well," he says, "and I want a lot of new viewers to discover the characters for the first time."
Granted, those might not be highly original sentiments — but if anyone's earned the right to be unoriginal once in a great while, it's Peter Chung.
|
|
|
|
Photo: Paramount Pictures
|
|
|
|
|
