CS Weekly Archive > DVD of the Day > 12/23/05

Storytelling Fluxtuations

by jeff goldsmith

Peter Chung (also directed), Mark Mars, Japhet Asher, Peter Gaffney

From the mid-90s MTV show Liquid TV, Aeon Flux began as a series of visually stunning, near-wordless shorts that became so successful MTV commissioned a series. At the core of this story is leather-bound assassin Aeon Flux (v. Denise Poirier) who fights, loves, kills, sabotages, and of course dies seemingly multiple times for her dualistic enemy and possibly true love, Trevor Goodchild (v. John Lee). Rather than spoon-feeding his audience with a traditional three-act structure each episode, Chung usually begins in act two, thus excising the set-up of act-one, and dives straight into the intrigue and action. This exclusion heightens the mystery as the onus is on the audience to draw their own conclusions and - dare I say -rely upon their imagination to fill in the blanks. Of note here, for this DVD set, Chung re-recorded dialogue with the original cast and both re-wrote scenes or re-used original scripted material that MTV originally had cut. The result is that this DVD set remains a better version of the story of Aeon Flux than what originally aired, due to the non-broadcast freedom of DVD, and it is the stories and characters who directly benefit from these revisions as the animation itself has not changed.

Aeon Flux: The Complete Animated Collection
Paramount Home Entertainment
Rated TV-MA; 221 min.
$39.98

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Jeff Goldsmith is senior editor for Creative Screenwriting magazine and serves as the Los Angeles Events Coordinator in charge of the Creative Screenwriting screening series.

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