Gee. Looks like SOMEBODY is a fanboy. From the article:

"Charlize gave a terrific performance and she looked just as lethal and capable as the previews promised. She makes for a terrific action hero, leaving the Terminator looking even more obsolete than he was in his last film, and making Lara Croft look like a whiny wannabe. It's easy to be biased toward Charlize, and if I were capable of being biased toward anyone, it would be her, but I managed to control myself. The way I saw it was that the movie was fantastic and Charlize was phenomenal, but if anyone else had done it (as well as or better) and had that same "it" factor that Charlize has flowing out of every pore on her gorgeous face, I would have felt exactly the same about the film as I do right now. And that is true. Reality: Charlize was in it, and she was amazing, and I can't think of anyone who has the talent and the physical grace, strength, and stamina to pull it off as well as she did."

I almost felt dirty reading this guys review. Should you trust a movie review from a guy you woldn't shake hands with??

Bah! I'll probably just wait for the DVD...

At the first fight scene, I was wondering why the director kept using closeup shots. You couldn't see the setting that well. Without a background, I thought it took away from the whole majesty of a good martial-arts fight (See Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Matrix). Then I saw the the military uniforms. God awful. Wow, they were cheap looking. These guys looked like they came out of an 80's Sci-Fi Movie. I realized that this is probably a pretty low-budget flick. A simple search on Google confirmed it.

Basically, Charlize is ok. The actors were pretty good. It was helluva lot better than SW Ep I-III acting. I the story was out there, but it's sci-fi, so I'll let it slide. The cheap look, though, really took away from the one area that I was expecting it to excel.

But there's no way a film this far out is going to be accepted by the mass consumers unless they can very closely relate to the characters, as evidenced by the success of Serenity.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't Serenity a commercial flop?

Sadly, because of the expense of making a film in this style, the studio's are only going to allow something to be made which they can sell. Even some of the bigger studios who're known to take risks (Miramax, for example) probably wouldn't have touched a true-to-the-series Aeon Flux film with a barge pole.

As a co-writer of several scripts (many optioned, none produced), I have noticed there a singular problem with getting approval of "risky" works. The problem is that "hollywood" is actually highly risk-averse. It's such a nasty, backstabbing business that nobody ever wants to stick their neck out. To this end, there is constant pressure for approved scripts to be comparable to something that has worked before. The classic script pitch jokes along the lines of "it's like The Omen meets Cocoon, in outer space" are an exaggeration of the pathological need to have every "new" idea be a permutation or hybrid of something that has been successful before. More points are awarded if another studio is in the process of making a similar movie. This is why you see the same damn movies come out over and over. Remember when all those "funny" cop-buddy movies came out where one of the cops is a dog? (shudder)
The last thing the money men want to hear is "we don't know how this will play, no one's ever made a movie like this". The last thing the pitchmen want is to say that. To that end, every time you go in to show them what you've got, they'll be almost singleminded in their goal of getting you to make your work comparable to something they think the money men will go for. The integrity of your concept is wholly immaterial. They will indeed actually make the most absurd suggestions for how you might change the script to make it more salable. Things like "can you put a scrappy kid in?" or "could you change the setting from fantasy to modern reality, get rid of the magic stuff, and make the main character a handsome young guy instead of a tough old man?"-- these are not exaggerations, this is the kind of stuff they actually say! And even if you don't want those changes, if you sell them the script they'll give it to someone else who will make those changes. On rare occasions it'll end up in the hands of someone who truly understands the underlying idea and we'll end up with something interesting, but for the most part the pressure to turn scripts into pablum leaves us with theaters full of stuff like "Cheaper By The Dozen 2".

If you found yourself bored and not at all involved within the first 10 minutes, blame it on your lack of imagination.

How is this different from the fanboys who cried out "If you didn't like the Matrix it's because you didn't get the Matrix"? Not that you are one of the fanboys who did that but I recall a time in slashdot history if you said anything bad about the Matrix you got modded as a troll and for those who didn't have mod points to beat you down with you were called a fucktard as they flung daggers at you.

Bottom line? Fanboys suck. I'm afraid that some womans racks is no reason for me to spend 8.50 to see a "geek" flick. That's what eMule is for, after all. I hate to even use the term geek in this context but I guess it is time for me to realize that, frankly, I'm not cool enough to hang with the geek crowd since I don't have the imagination it takes to make crap anime and comic book live action films seem worth my time.

Much better than I expected. The acting was good (Trevor is a hard character to get right, and Marton Csokas pulls it off brilliantly), the action was everything you'd expect, and the set design and shooting locations were breathtaking.

The story was well conceived, written, and executed - perhaps too much so. The original concept didn't trouble itself too much with plot, but the movie comes across with an interesting scifi story in its own right. It would have been very easy for a director to invest too much into the movie story at the expense of keeping to the simplicity of the original concept. While the two don't seamlessly combine in the movie, it reflects very well onto the director and producer that the movie story didn't completely overwhelm the movie and leave us all in WTF land ala Highlander 2. I was expecting 2 stars, and I give it a 3. Nice job, guys.

I think the "technical inconsistencies" pointed out by some readers are clearly bullshit - you have a problem with clones remembering their past lives in a world with strap-on transdimensional travel suits and complex multimedia messages being suspended in aqueous solution? Gimme a break. It wouldn't surprise me if all memory of your past lives was stored in a parasitic frog embedded in the abdomen of your next generation. How can you fail at suspension of disbelief in what has always been a consummately unbelievable world both in the cartoon and the movie?

The problem when you watch the original Aeon Flux animated series is that other than people having the same names, it has little in common.

I disagree.

There are definitely some significant differences, but consistency wasn't exactly a hallmark of the original animated version. Aeon Flux died on a regular basis, Trevor Goodchild turned out to be (for one episode at least) a hollow shell controlled by a Custodian - which was itself controlled by a strange little bean-shaped thing, etc.

I watched some of the episodes after seeing the movie. It had been awhile, and I was surprised just how much was from the original series (spoilers):

- (Obviously) Sithandra and the run across no-man's-land
- Trevor's cloning experiments
- The in-phase/out-of-phase thing
- The odd flat/detached acting
- Una (although she isn't Aeon's sister in the series)
- The Relicle and Aeon climbing up its tail is right out of "War," although it has a different purpose in that episode
- The jungle outside the city at the end is from the jungle-outside-the-cities episode of the series
- The end of the film story is similar in spirit to the end of the animated series, just under different circumstances
- The "lady in red getting snatched" shot in the film vs. "lady in red gets shot by a sniper, then dragged into a hidden closet by two soldiers" in the series.
- The past lives thing is reminiscent of the animated episode about the drug that erases peoples' memories.

I'm sure there's others, and I haven't finished re-watching the original series yet.

Obviously no Hollywood studio was going to make a film exactly like the original series. But I thought they did a pretty credible job in keeping the same feeling. There were certainly some believability gaps, but that's hardly an issue when we're talking about a film based on a series where a secret agent travels between two connected cities via cars that open a passage between each other through a giant zipper in the freeway.

It was just a stupid movie. Seriously, a virus that wipes out 99% of the population on Earth? How the fuck did that thing spread? Did it travel on the backs of photons? And a society which has mastered genetics to such an extent to be able to clone humans and yet it can't handle something as simple as invitro fertilization? They have to enact a complicated scheme to secretly implant women with cloned embryos unknowingly? Give me a break. Oh yeah, and I forgot. Love conquers all.

Beyond the stupidity of the plot, the action was just boring and uninteresting. It's Aeon breaking people's necks for 2 hours. We never get any explanation at all for where she's acquired these amazing acrobatic skills and killing techniques. We get no information at all about her background in this resistance, who the freaky resistance leader lady actually is, etc ... Beyond the boring action and complete lack of any context at all for the central character, there's the stupid techno-wanking. Seriously, Aeon breaks into a "surveillance center" that looks like some sort of suspended waterfall. And to destroy it, she pulls a fucking drain plug, and all the water swirls down. Who the fuck comes up with technology like this? Anime sci-fi geeks. And the chairman's security perimeter consisted entirely of tree pods that shoot ... well, something, and grass that turns into knives. The latter could have been defeated with a pair of steel-toed work boots.

Beyond that, Charlize Theron looked positively awful. I don't know what it is with anime geeks and making women's hair look like an oil spill (see Trinity in The Matrix for another example), but it looked terrible. Theron's a blond and was just the wrong choice for the role entirely. The outfits weren't exactly flattering either. I don't know why geeks have this unified vision of the fashion of the future being composed entirely of jump suits, but it's fucking stupid. It may work when you can draw women who have a waist line as thin as my LCD, but real women actually have midsections. And what the hell was with Aeon wearing an all white jump suit when she was trying to break in to the surveillance center at night?

This movie was not worth $7.50 and driving through shit weather to get to. It's not even a good rental. It's just stupid.

This "movie" [rottentomatoes.com] at RottenTomatoes. Yay, a 10% rating.

It's pretty obvious to me the "reviewer" above was making an advertisement for his site on Slashdot (compare the author URL with the "review" URL, it sure is becoming common these days), and gets a boner from Charlize Theron.

According to these stats [boxofficemojo.com], Serenity has about broken even, counting domestic and overseas ticket sales.

Rule of thumb would be that the theatrical release generates around 25% [factbook.net] of a film's income. DVD/video sales and rental are usually around half the total gross. Given the nature of Firefly/Serenity's fan base, I would think it likely they might get more than the usual percentage from DVD sales. Word of mouth and unexpectedly high DVD sales were what spurred creation of the movie in the first place.

I don't know if there's a definition of "flop". It seems that Serenity is almost certain to be a money-maker overall, and about equally certain not be be a block-buster of "Titanic" proportions. Still 100% return on an investment isn't bad.

I can recall seeing Josh Whedon quoted to the effect that Serenity needed to make $80M to guarantee development of another sequel film. I don't know if that's total, or just theatrical release.