Shortly thereafter, she uses her fingers to locate and then remove bullets from Trevor’s shoulder and back. In the process, her hand gets ripped to shreds. To take out two Stormtrooper-type guards, Aeon grabs a jagged piece of shrapnel, slashing at them and then stabbing them. But a couple of scenes slow down and/or load up on blood. Most of the conflict consists of choreographed lunging, hitting and falling, seen in a quick-cut style that prevents you from dwelling on any one detail too long. (We hear her body hit the ground, but don’t see it.) A lethal obstacle course surrounds the government “citadel.” It contains millions of knife blades sticking up through the grass, and darts automatically fire from pods hanging in the trees. One of Aeon’s comrades falls off a tall tower. Machine-gun fire leaves scores of bodies strewn around a courtyard. The body count ratchets up as the film’s minutes wind down. She seems to enjoy blowing stuff up (from walls to a large aircraft) with timed explosive devices and “little steel balls” that roll toward her when she whistles for them. She’s a veritable cyclone of destruction, and pretty much anybody who crosses her path either immediately meets his maker or, at the very least, ends up on the receiving end of a wicked haymaker. Strangling is far from Aeon’s only method of inducing death. But she quickly learns, as we do, that “nothing is quite as it appears to be.” When the gate is finally opened by her opposition-force Handler, she bolts headlong for the finish line-the assassination of Chairman Trevor Goodchild. Then her sister gets killed during a “government action,” and her drive for revenge makes her feel like a purebred Kentucky racehorse leaning hard on the starting gate. What is apparent is that she’s been dying to kick a few head honchos off their perches of power for longer than she can remember. So the exact reason why she’s part of an anti-government freedom-fighting militia 400 years in the future isn’t clear. (You already know more than she seems to.) And she’s relatively unconcerned about what’s going to happen to her next. Not that Aeon herself knows who she is or where she came from. Now she’s come of age on the big screen, fully realized in a live-action sci-fi thriller. Then she entered into puberty four years later when the not-really-music-anymore network aired 10 half-hour (still-animated) episodes. At first she existed only as a 2- to 3-minute animated short.
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