Aeon Flux (2005)

How Penrose Hair broke Hollywood.

It’s November! It is Television Month here at B-Movie Tea.

Each Tuesday this month, we will focus on a weird or terrible film that began as a TV show.

It won’t include any Marvel Movies, even though some of those are weird, terrible and involve characters who had TV shows years before they were on the big screen.

But we are going to start with a superhero movie, it would be irresponsible to not include at least one.

Because, even though Martin Scorsese and Jennifer Aniston won’t admit it, superhero movies have permanently changed the cinema-going experience.

When the credits role, people no longer mass exit a film.

They sit and wait for post credit scenes.

And while they sit, they do what was once considered unthinkable, they read the credits.

And they learn things they otherwise would not have known

Such as how many personal hairdressers a movie star employs.

While watching credits scroll for one of the Avenger films, I remember thinking it odd that Benedict Cumberbatch and Anthony Mackie needed hairdressers. They both had such short and simple haircuts.

But almost as soon as I thought that, I realized how foolish I was being.

Many types of movies, but especially superhero movies succeed or fail on the protagonist’s hairdo.

Aeon Flux, has never been licensed to Marvel (or DC for that matter), but if you assumed a film about her was a superhero movie, you wouldn’t be wrong.

Flux was the eponymous femme fatale antihero of an animated TV series that aired on MTV in the early 90s.

The show got attention for disturbing visuals like a city getting blitzed not with bombs, but corpses of the soldiers sent to war, suits that vibrate the human body so quickly it shifts to another dimension and people having their feet amputated and replaced with extra hands.

The show also got attention for the unique character of Aeon Flux, a devout anarchist who posed as a mercenary in order to cause maximum chaos.

She also had a really unique hairdo.

Perhaps I could describe it, if I knew more about hair and makeup design, but I am a loss for words.

So I did what many critics do in such a situation, I bled into an empty USB port, waited for ChatGPT to come online and asked it to describe the hairstyle of Aeon Flux.

Then came a sulfuric aroma and the strange wheezing sound of English spoken backwards, and the following text appeared on my screen.

“Aeon Flux, a character from an animated TV series, is known for her distinctive black hair that is short on the sides and longer on top, often styled in a gravity-defying manner. The hair on top is typically swept back or partially tied up, creating a unique and edgy look that complements her futuristic and adventurous persona.”

“Well, I thought, as I opened windows and applied a bandage, That was disappointing.”

So, if even AI struggles to explain Flux’s coif, I don’t feel bad describing it as hair that that resembles the horns of a mouflon ram or the mustache of Salvador Dali if it were as wide as a pair of shoulders.

Naturally, when the time came for Paramount Pictures to adapt Aeon Flux into a live action film, one of the biggest challenges was recreating the iconic hairdo,

And apparently, it could not be done.

Aeon’s hairstyle was deemed akin to the Necker Cube, the Impossible Fork or the Penrose Steps. Something that could exist in a two dimensional world, but not any reality a cinematographer could record.

The original hairstyle was abandoned.

Charlize Theron was cast as Aeon.

It was her first time playing the lead in an action movie and she did a good job recreating the physicality and personae of the cartoon superhero.

Unfortunately, she was given this terrible hairdo that was constantly in her eyes and made her look like the leading man on a CW show.

It wound up negatively effecting every aspect of production including...

The Plot: In the year 2011, an industrial disease kills off 99% of the world’s population. (Ah yes, my worst memory from that year).

The surviving 70 million odd inhabitants of planet Earth all wind up living in a mega-city called Bregnia.

400 years go by.

Bregnia is now ruled by Trevor Goodchild VII (Marton Csoka), a fashion-conscious despot who forces the masses to wear haute couture at all times on pain of disappearance.

Aeon Flux (Charlize Theron) is part of a sect who believe in anarchy and BDSM attire.

She is also an outspoken critic of Trevor, which upsets his protective brother, Oren Goodchild (Jonny Lee Miller) who orders Aeon’s assassination, but the incompetent thugs he sends mess up and kill her sister, Una (Amelia Warner) by mistake.

This radicalizes Aeon and soon she’s leading a mission to assassinate Trevor in his home.

But just when she has him at knifepoint, she realizes that she knows him from somewhere, from dreams she’s had or perhaps a past life and he realizes the same thing, about her.

And then reality begins to unspool!

Soon, Pete Postlethwaite is lecturing the audience while riding a giant kite.

Aeon Flux is ultimately a sad experience,

because it just doesn’t work.

If you aren’t familiar with the source material, you’ll have no idea what’s going on.

If you are, you will notice several earnest attempts to reproduce the characters and imagery from the cartoon, but also notice that none translate from animation to live action effectively.

Why this result?

We can’t blame Frances McDormand, we know from Transformers: Dark of the Moon that she is comfortable starring in big budget shit shows, but how did a movie produced by Gale Anne Hurd turn out like this?

That isn’t fair of me. I know the blame cannot be tied to one person, or even a small group of people.

And I can’t help but think, if only they’d found a way to reproduce that hairdo, everything might have fallen into place!

Still there is some truth to the cliché about Silver Linings.

The hair-in-the-eyes look didn’t work for Charlize Theron, but it looked great on Rihanna who made arrangements to have the same hairstyle for her iconic Umbrella video.

So, there’s that.

The Tea: For this movie, it’s not the type of tea you drink, it how you serve it. Get yourself a Bauhaus teapot, or log into Etsy and purchase one that attempts to incorporate Escher design.

The Snack: In this movie, Aeon takes pills that allow her to experience a mutual trance with an unnamed authority figure (Frances McDormand). So…have some really strong cough drops.