Aeon Flux is style without substance. I expected the lack of substance; I didn't expect the style. In other words, I had low expectations, and I came out pretty impressed. But it still isn't that great of a movie.

Pre-movie experience: While walking to work, I saw a poster for Aeon Flux at the cinema right outside my workplace. I thought to myself, "Isn't Aeon Flux that anime? But like... not a real anime... but an MTV anime..." I was right in the sense that this is the same Aeon Flux that I was thinking of, and that "anime" was pretty crappy, but the poster looked pretty good. I read a few of the other reviews for this movie, and they said the plot was complicated. "Yeah," I thought, "didn't the anime had some sort of circulatory time travel induced hallucination thing with a girl and a glowing green alien ball or something like that?" Well, this movie has zero time travel, and zero glowing green alien balls in it. Either my memory of the anime is completely off, or the movie is based on the anime only in name.

Synopsis: This virus wipes out 99% of humanity, but one particular scientist finds a cure. But then people mysteriously start disapearing, and there's a group of people who think that the government is behind it. So they form a rebel group, and the sexual female lead assassin character happens to be part of that rebel group.

Plot Plausibility: There's a lot of plausibility problems during the movie. I think at least 3 or 4 times, a character will be completely surrounded by "bad guys" armed to the teeth, and screwed, and they will plead "Please, trust me" and the bad guys do trust them. The rebel group is also not well fleshed out: There seems to be a leader (the red-haired girl), but no one actually ever follows her orders. There's also five super-assassins featured during the whole movie (including the lead one), and all of them except the lead character gets killed by stormtroopers. "Stormtroopers", in case you aren't familiar with the lingo, is any generic bad guy who fires some fully automatic weapon so that you get to see bullets flying everywhere, but never manages to actually hit anyone. In one scene, the lead assassin is standing right in the middle of a grass field, completely immobile, and there must be 20 or 30 stormtroopers, not more than 5 meters away, all blasting their full auto chain guns at her, and none of them are able to even nick her. But then, the stormtroopers manage to hit all 4 of the snipers hiding in towers some 200-300 meters away, even sending a bullet right through the scope of the sniper rifle.

Visuals: Pretty damn good. There's some very interesting designs, not only of weapons and costumes, but also more mundane objects like fruits and teapots. When the lead assassin gets into the secret laboratory, the transition between the two worlds is very well done. The dream sequences are a bit overdone. It's those 20 flashbacks all squeezed into 5 seconds, shown seemingly at random to confuse the viewer; you know the kind. There's too many of those.

Audio: I didn't notice the music, which is a GOOD thing for movies. When the scene was exciting, the music was exciting. When the scene was emotional, I can't even remember what kind of music was playing there, so who knows what tricks they were playing with my mind? Sound effects were also very appropriate, with nothing standing out as being odd or out of place. Everything felt very natural, and that's just dandy.

I think if you go in, not expecting much, you'll enjoy this movie. And I think nobody really expects much out of a film called "Aeon Flux". So I'd have to call this film a success. 7 out of 10.