Aeon Flux

Aeon Flux is a 2005 film, based on an animated series, set in a dystopian future, where technologies such as nanotechnology are portrayed as both the means of oppression of humanity and the means of salvation. Aeon Flux is a highly skilled operative for a clandestine organization seeking to bring down the governing elite, using nanotechnology-based high-technology weapons.

While the MTV Liquid Television animation series of 1991 and 1995 was a cult hit, the film adaptation did [Page 9]poorly, costing an estimated $60 million to produce but returning only $25 million. Reviews of the film tended to criticize it as too somber and lacking emotional interest.

The film is set 400 years in the future, where an industrial-related virus has killed 99 percent of the world's population. The remaining humans live in the last city on Earth, Bregna, that is surrounded by a wall and controlled by the scientist Trevor Goodchild and his brother Oren. They see themselves as protecting the remaining 5 million people left alive, but have created a tightly controlled and closely monitored world that restrains many freedoms. Bregna appears utopian, with beautiful architecture and space, but the citizens of Bregna are disturbed by nightmares beneath their veneer of contentment. The plague has made people sterile and so the Goodchilds are cloning people, but the process leaves them haunted by memories of former lives.

A rebel group know as the Monicans is seeking to bring down the Goodchild regime, by assassinating Trevor Goodchild, and Aeon Flux is the assassin, representing a choice to reject the technological solutions imposed on humanity. Among her arsenal of weapons is a ring that releases small metallic balls that are based upon advanced nanotechnology. So advanced technology is not only used to repress, but also to break the oppression. But the core conflict is between two ideologies: a rigidly controlled scientific ideology and a more ethically based humanist ideology. The dominating portrayal of technology in the film is a technological utopia that is actually a dystopia, where technology has been used to enslave humans, who then have to fight back to reclaim their humanity. This message is also used in films such as Terminator and The Matrix and sequels.

Nanotechnology and biotechnology become the weapons of control over humanity, but not self-replicating intelligent technology, such as used in The Matrix of Terminator films, rather where the controlling technologies are in the hands of a small powerful elite. This reflects a fundamental concern about new technologies that has been revealed in public attitude studies, that concerns about new technologies are based less on aspects of the technologies themselves, but more on who controls them. In the cast of genetic modification there was evident diminished trust in technologies that were owned by multinational companies. Nanotechnologies are less likely to be monopolized by multinational companies, but this is likely to be offset by the convergence of technologies, as portrayed in this film, so that nanotechnology portrayals continue to demonstrate the fundamental concern about any new technologies being used by the few to dominate the majority.

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