Aeon Flux analysis part 2

Continuing yesterday's analysis and listening to the directors commentary I learned that this original pilot was broken up into 6 2 minute segments to go along with Liquid Tv on MTV. So today where we start off with is the second installment of Aeon Flux and what Peter Chang mentions is that his goal with this segment was to set expectations and then shatter those expectations. 

In the first episode we see Aeon in a typical hero role, the violence is graphic and over the top while the music scores the scene in a bombastic score. Indiana Jones was an inspiration for the score during this scene and we get a total tonal shift in this second part which was inspired by Peter Chang's frustration with action movies only showing half of the story. This time she is almost cast in a psycho like role and this is communicated through the piles and piles of dead bodies that have formed a significant amount of blood on the floor. 

We even get a cool upshot from the blood looking up to Aeon as she runs through shooting people. We see men standing on the sidelines almost as if they are waiting for the massacre to end to come in as a cleanup crew. One man sits with his legs missing. He punctuates this scene and then drives home the purpose of this scene by telling a very brief story between two of the guards.

Peter points out first that he wanted them to wear masks so they are depersonalized which makes the reveal when one stops and takes the helmet off of one of them more powerful. I remember Ken Levine saying you cant tell the story of every person in a game, but you can tell one persons story which will connect you to everyones story in a particular scene. Here we see he is given the chance to fight again when the woman posts a gun underneath him so he gets the chance to continue shooting at her. 

Its really a very weird scene, and as the other person is killed she takes off her mask and there is a moment when they both realize that they have the disease and they know each other, its implied that they are lovers. The man on the ground dies and the woman crumbles over crying over his death.

Here we see again another reinforcement of the fact that there is a virus here in this world as its depicted at various times in this scene. We close this scene out with a very strange first shot of Terry Goodchild as he walks towards the bloodbath and sees a small insect crawl out of the water. He picks it up and holds it in his hand as he looks at the separation between his fingers before we cut to black.

Peter Chang had a few other thoughts on this portion that are worth taking note of, one that he wants you to come to your own conclusions about what is going on in this story and he doesn't want to talk about what each individual moment means. Secondly he says that the core of Aeon Flux is the inherent value of the individual, and he shows this by making Aeon having no real ties to family or society. 

Which is interesting because in part 3 we will see that there is a suggestion that she is apart of a group of mercenaries but Peter later ditched this idea and wanted it to be more about what her personal motivations were about. This is really interesting to me because this is still something that is considered cannon but even within this there are things he chose to leave out as he went through the process of writing the other episodes.