Pull out a $10 bill and hold it in your hand. Now take a good long look at the above image. You have to admit, Charlize Theron is pretty attractive and aesthetically speaking this is a great movie poster. While you’re looking, hold tight to that $10 bill…are you doing it? Look carefully and really take it all in…and now put the money back in your pocket and send me a thank you note for saving you your hard earned cash.
Thanks to my local comic shop I had the opportunity to go see a sneak preview of Aeon Flux tonight with James, Jeff and John (I was the odd man out…no J in my name). We had great BBQ beforehand and enjoyed excellent conversation. The movie? Well contrary to what my friends say it did not suck. In order for a movie to really suck you have to have some kind of emotional connection to it. It takes passion to generate feelings of suck-i-tude for a film. Aeon Flux just couldn’t generate that spark of passion. It was a movie that was simply just there. At roughly 90 minutes I heard many say it seemed too long. For my part I wish they would’ve added 30 minutes to the movie and made me care about the characters. There is nothing storywise that you haven’t seen in movies before and done much better. This year alone The Island explored similar themes and was a fascinating, fun, rollercoaster of a ride. Aeon Flux was blah. Too soon into the movie I was asked to make an emotional connection with a character who dies…she was onscreen for all of 3 minutes. I never saw the supposed “bad guy” do anything bad and didn’t have any emotional connection to him or the other characters as the twists of “who is the real bad guy” began.
The frustrating thing about Aeon Flux is what it could have been. The actors all do a great job, they simply have no material to work with. Charlize Theron is beautiful to look at in her form fitting black outfits and does a fine job in a very two dimensional role. Marton Csokas and the other actors/actresses are all convincing enough in their various roles but there just isn’t anything for them to do. Charlize Theron kicks a great deal of butt but frankly I don’t care because I don’t have anything worthwhile to tell me why I should be glad that she’s kicking their butts. It is a poor, poor story that I have to believe any amature screenwriter could have taken and built a better film with. It is unfortunate as I was really looking forward to this being an entertaining movie. The special effects are good and the settings are interesting, but not enough to bolster this weak story.
Should you see it in the theatre? No. Wait until it comes on DVD and then get a friend to pay for the rental. You’ll be glad you did.
i’m glad i read this then. i would have paid to see it, but now i’ll wait til i can rent it.. maybe even at the library, where i don’t have to pay. lol
how disappointing.. it looked like it had potential.
as for The Family Stone.. not bad.. much more dramatic than i thought it’d be. i was crying one moment & laughing the next!
I’ll have to check out the trailer for The Family Stone. I’ve seen posters at the theatre but haven’t seen anything else about it.
It was truely disappointing. Another Hollywood film where they think it’s just enough to have a hot chick in spandex and cool special effects. It will bomb because as Carl notes there is no story that makes you care about the characters.
Silly observations. We have a lead character who is an assasin who never assassinates anyone. We have tons of cool machines yet of all the people we see there is no one remotely smart enough to have designed or built any of the high tech gadgets. The main characters fight and kill many faceless soliders so we don’t feel like the ” good ” guys are really killing anyone human. I could go on and on.
Thank god this movie was free. On the upside I enjoyed spending the evening with you guys. Mary it was a pleasure meeting your brother and James and Carl it was fun as always.
Good observations Jeff, I agree with you wholeheartedly.
I loved Marton Csokas as Celeborn (of course I did). Just stating the obvious!
I really enjoyed him as the bad guy in xXx! He was given nothing to work with in this film. He was able to make more of a connection in his brief seconds in LOTR than he could with this film.
I’ll mark it down as a “last resort” then 🙂
At about 60 minutes in I actually considered going to sleep till it was over. The movie didn’t start till 10pm and I was a little tired anyway.
As I stated in a forum I visit. It wasn’t bad, or good, just very boring.
What I’ll be interested to see is if people, after reading a ton of bad reviews , go see it and have that reverse psychology reaction of actually thinking it was quite good. I doubt it, but one never knows….
Thank you Carl…putting my ten bucks back where it belongs!
In an envelope to send to me, right Suzanne?
Riiiiiight! (Nice try.)
Thanks for the save carl. Have u seen Rent yet?
No, the more I read the reviews the less inclined I am to see it…not so much because of negative reviews so much as it seems pretty dated. I won’t end up seeing it in the theatre after all…maybe on video but I have my doubts.
Totally unrelated to the post, but can you still access Angela’s scifi chick site? I keep getting an error message.
Occasionally that happens, its up and going right now.
I had considered going with the guys to the movie, but I am so glad I didn’t waste my time…
Thankfully you all enjoyed your time eating and talking; the night wasn’t a total waste.
It was great to get to see John again. I’ve only seen him a couple of times in the last several years.
i wish i had gotten up & walked out of Rent. what a waste of money & my time.
i actually don’t even want to admit i saw it. blech.
After I read a few reviews I decided that Rent actually was not a movie that I wanted to see. It sounded like it had become extremely dated and just didn’t sound very interesting. The music from the trailers didn’t really grab my attention either.
Man am I glad I read your review. We have a parent’s night out this Friday and I was wanting to take Karen to see it because, you know, it looks like a date movie. I feel in a way saved and that $ is on it’s way to your mailbox.
Tom, I heard Cinderella Man is being re-released to theatres. That would be a great movie for you and Karen to go see. It’s something you’d both really enjoy!
I’ll donate the $ to your new TV fund Tom! Cinderella Man actually comes out on DVD tomorrow so you could rent it but it is definitely a good one to see in the theatre if you can catch it.
Bummer that this sucked. The anime was pretty cool.
I would like to see Cinderella Man in the theater but I heard you can’t bring a phone anywhere near Russell Crowe even a cell phone. Oh well. Yeah Rob I must have missed the trailer that showed any pets but I sure was looking forward to the cool special effects and camera angles.
what did your error message say, Fence?
are you able to access now?