Æon Flux

Just saw the movie. Sure the movie is set 400 years into the future, but anyone who watches it would not refer to it as a Sci-Fi flick. Its about the choices humans will have to face once technology catches up with them to such an extent where the basics of reproduction have changed.




So Bregna is the only surviving city on the planet, 400 years after a virus wipes out most of the human population on the planet. (Incidentally, this virus occurs in the year 2011, around the doomsday prediction time of the Hindu, Bible and not in the same league, but Nostradamus. After this plague, a perfect civilisation is supposedly born) Anyway, so a scientist discovers the cure for the disease, and ofcourse, his descendants rule the last surviving city. 400 years later, a bunch of Rebels called the Monicans are attempting to overthrow this regime.




Enter Æon Flux, with an ability to catch a fly with her eyelids (would be outrageous if apna Rajnikanth did it), kill people by twisting their heads, and walk in ways Rajnikanth wouldn't dream of.




She finds out that the survivors of the virus had one problem - they were all sterile (is this an allusion to the virus being AIDS?). Everyone in the city are clones - cloned over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. Not more, exactly seven times that is, 400 years in the future. Aeon is hunting down Goodman, the scientist-leader, and 400 years is sufficient time to justify her roaming around in a severely underclad fashion. A couple of more centuries would have led to a lot of sperm wastage.




Goodchild (the cloned scientist) discovers a cure for the sterility, but his younger brother wants control over this Utopia, and kills off all the people whom he cures. He cannot control this longer, as more and more females become pregnant on their own.




Aeon's observation at this point, must be noted:

We're meant to die. Its what makes everything about us matter.

Well, Æon destroys the clone banks (excellent reasoning - all clones are but ghosts), the evil brother is killed, and people can reproduce, so happy ending.




Brilliantly done movie, don't even want to analyse THAT, was too taken up by the story, but Charlize Theron doing her own stunts, and that too in THIS seemingly Rajnikanth inspired movie, is something that must be appreciated.




Somehow, I feel that the whole story is inspired from Arthur C Clarke's "the city and the stars" where Diasper is the only city on the planet, where human beings are cloned from a clone bank. The only difference is, unlike Bregna, people in Diasper know that they are cloned, and on reaching puberty, recall everything from their past lives. The city, the cloning banks and the organisation, a sort of "perfect city" with a deeply set fallacy - one of eternal life, is the same.




Again, the future of reproduction is scarier than it seems. Cloning is only one facet, we are already headed that way with Caesarian sections (a natural birth is nature's way of making us strong), and test tube babies are already rampant - imagine technology 400 years in the future. Cloning is the least of our worries actually, people can have kids with anyone as long as they get a DNA sample from anywhere (imagine the paternity suits in the transition, when this technology is new) (theoretically, we have that technology even now), people can have kids with other people of the same gender, people can be engineered to have two heads, eight eyes, four hands (another aspect covered in Aeon Flux) - almost anything that we posess the genes to, and we have a large amount of possible variations in THAT.



Scary, really scary, but life will find a way.