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Twenty years ago, the two great pillars of science were Stephen Hawking and Marty McFly, with McFly's modified DeLorean spinning intellectual donuts around Hawking's four-amp wheelchair. That said, the original Back To The Future trilogy left many unanswered questions regarding time travel and Oedipal conundrums. Quantum-minded cinephiles have long clamored for a fourth installment and they get their wish with the arrival of Aeon Flux, a mind-melding romp that hurtles audiences to the brink of total consciousness. Which is nice.

The adventure picks up in the year 2085, where Emily Brown (Charlize Theron) runs the clock company founded by her great grandfather, Dr. Emmett Brown. Emily discovers that a mysterious group of "collectors" is actually a Libyan hit squad bent on settling old scores. The would-be assassins have not forgotten how Dr. Brown cheated them out of plutonium in 1985. They steal the long-mothballed DeLorean with the intention of going back one hundred years and beheading the good doctor. The leader, Ali Abdul Jabbar (Pete Postlethwaite) leaves Emily a note, "A fatwa is not cottage cheese," he explains, "There is no expiration date."

Emily needs to go back in time to save her grandfather, so she digs through his notes and finds plans for the next generation of time machine -- a replacement for the Flux Capacitor called the Aeon Flux Capacitor. Relying on advances in String Theory, the Aeon Flux Capacitor travels through wormholes in the Universe. And unlike the DeLorean, it has cup holders and a spittoon.

Upon arrival in Hill Valley, circa 1985, Emily discovers that the lethal Libyans have already killed Marty McFly, and that Doc Brown has gone into hiding. Needing help locating Doc, Emily teams up with the emasculated Biff Tannen (Thomas F. Wilson). In a powerful sequence reminiscent of Rocky's "Eye of the Tiger" montage, Emily teaches Biff to be manly again, and he becomes her partner and lover to boot, with Emily playfully peaking under the sheets and cooing, "I hope to get a lot of flux out of that capacitor."

Aeon Flux neatly ties up the cosmological thesis of the Back To The Future series. By bringing back the jolly Jihadis from the original, the film reminds us that progress depends on the defeat of backward thinking. Further, Aeon Flux presents a Grand Unifying Theory for the time-space continuum, boiling it down to something Marty McFly said two decades ago: "If you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything."

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