Jack of Harts

Aeon Flux is a surprisingly deep movie about life, death, and life. Rumor, and directorial statements, have it that the studio recut the movie after she was done to make it less artsy. A part of me would really like to see the director’s cut, but that is mainly because I love director’s cuts. They are almost always better in my experience than the studio cuts.

Anyways, I have seen this movie before. It was a long time ago, and I slept through most of it, so this was my first real time viewing the movie. After having seen now, I can say that it was not the fault of the movie that I fell asleep. It was all me. I worked overnights at the time, so I slept at odd times, and the people who wanted to see it wanted to see it in the middle of my sleep schedule. So what do I think about the movie, now? I like it. Very artsy in style, though artsy with blood.

It is placed four centuries after a plague killed all mankind. One man managed to find a cure and save a few thousand people, and their descendents live in a single city state now. Walled off from the world, they live in a near utopia with some dark aspects. People are having more and more nightmares as the decades go by, and people disappear from the streets. This is led many to form an underground resistance against the government, and that is where our heroine comes in.

She is Aeon, the best operative the resistance has, and it’s her job to change the future. That’s the quick intro there, and the full story gets complicated fast. Complicated in a good way, actually. Charlize Theron does a very good job playing the namesake, and in fact was badly injured doing some of the stunts. And looking at the stunts, they were looked like Matrix-level quality stuntwork to me. The movie was filmed in several real world locations that had never allowed filming before, and they are amazingly beautiful. They really nailed the idea of the paradisiacal utopian surface of the world, from the virtual world scenes to the real world botanical gardens.

All that is well and good, but did I enjoy it? Yes, I did. It’s not my favorite movie in the world, but I’m very happy to have seen it. I know the critics panned it, audience reviews are mixed, and it didn’t earn out its costs in the end. But here’s the thing. It’s an action spy movie with science fiction, philosophical, and art film elements, directed by a lady, and starring a lady. It’s not an over-the-top film like Bond, Kingsman, or those Expendables films that practically lampshade themselves. It actually shoots for being a serious movie, with real serious questions about the quality and nature of life.

I think it succeeds in that, but I can understand why it wouldn’t do as well in the theatres. Artsy, serious movies usually just don’t make great blockbusters, and the studio wanted a blockbuster, recut it as a blockbuster, marketed it as a blockbuster, and tried to get the critics to accept it as a blockbuster. Neither the critics nor the audiences accepted it as a blockbuster, and so it failed to earn out its production costs in the theatres. But I think it is a movie worth seeing. It is beautiful, well crafted, and I would greatly like to see a director’s cut version just to see what the director wanted it to be.

I’ll give the studio version a solid thumbs up for now, though.

I remember, when I was young, I would see that a book got a Hugo award and think…I have to read this. There were so many “what ifs” in those books. So many cool ideas. They influenced how I thought, and how I write. And it is my considered opinion that Hugo-award winning stories have changed the world for the better. They’ve made us think about stuff in ways we never would have otherwise.

But a few years ago, seemingly out of the blue as far as I knew, some very good authors questioned whether or not the Hugos were still like that. They suggested that the Hugos had a political bias, and suggested that people vote for stories they enjoyed, not those designed to push the political narrative they said the Hugos were supporting. I didn’t know what to think about those charges, but Worldcon’s response was amazing. They brought out the guns and started a full media-onslaught against the questioners, designed to label them as Nazis or worse, and anyone who supported them in any way as the wrong kind of fan to be involved in Science Fiction at all. And what happened when the members of Worldcon voted for the stories these questioners suggested? Worldcon added a new option. The No Award. The ability to vote to give out nothing at all, and to blanket reject the nominations of their own members.

Looking at this as a fan of Science Fiction all my life, and as a published author in my own right, I saw this as a sad day for my genre. I black mark. A dividing line had been cast that would be a long time in healing, if ever. Well, this week, another line was cast in the sand. Worldcon banned one of their members from coming to the con at all. From coming to the convention grounds, or any hotel that did business with the convention. Why? Well, he was planning on wearing a body cam to the convention.

You see, he promotes himself as a leading Hispanic, Conservative, Christian, Science Fiction author, and voices have been raised against him. He reports that threats were made against him. Enough that he was asking for people to walk with him at the con so he wouldn’t be alone, and enough that he said he was going to wear a body cam, in case somebody confronted him.

This week, Worldcon reduced his paid membership from “attending” to “supporting,” and told him over e-mail that he was banned for “expecting and planning to engender a hostile environment.” They would remove him from the premises if he arrived at the con or any hotel working with the con. They told him their decision was final and there would be no appeal. And at the same time, they announced on numerous public Internet venues that he was banned from the convention for violating their code of conduct.

Once again, I think this is a sad day for Science Fiction in general. When a major Sci-Fi convention wants to run a published Sci-Fi author out of their space, it generates more division in the community itself.

We’ve always asked “what if?” We’ve been a community that speculates about the future for over a hundred years, going back to the greats who wrote stories about going to the moon or about Martians invading Earth. We’ve included real life scientists writing about the possibility of alien contact, we’ve speculated about ring structures on a solar scale, and dragons flying on alien worlds. We’ve seen so much, written from so many different angles and beliefs. Our very strength as a genre has been based on our acceptance of ideas that seem…well…alien. Different. Many of our best stories have been based on the idea that something is fundamentally different than what we initially perceive.

I think it is a very bad day for all of us when those differences are demonized. I think it misses the point of our entire genre when we are told not to think different thoughts, or believe different things. And I think it hurts us all when we shun those who think differently.

And when that happens, it is a sad day for our community, a wound that will be a long time in healing, if ever.