No Flux left to give: why Æon deserves another look.
Nobody blinks in Æon Flux. Not in surprise, not in pain, not even in recognition. It’s as if the entire cast is caught in a slow-motion perfume advert set in a bioengineered terrarium, held aloft by conviction and chromatic gels. And somehow, against all odds and because of some, the result is oddly mesmerising.
The 2005 adaptation of Peter Chung’s cult animation is a peculiar beast – part studio Frankenstein, part transhumanist tone poem masquerading as action movie. It swaps the chaotic, twitchy surrealism of the MTV original for something cooler, smoother, and far more restrained, like an underground resistance movement managed by Apple’s design team. As an act of adaptation, it’s flagrantly unfaithful. As an exercise in atmosphere, it’s oddly sincere. That the two instincts never fully reconcile is part of its charm, and its failure.
This live-action Æon Flux didn’t spring from cultural demand so much as opportunistic mimicry. Its greenlight owes less to Peter Chung’s elliptical animation and more to the precedent set by The Matrix and X-Men. Once leather-clad rebels and philosophical sci-fi proved they could turn a profit, studios scrambled to raid the archives for properties that might be reshaped into sleek, kinetic action vehicles. Æon Flux, with its high-concept world and recognisable aesthetic, became prime real estate for a makeover – one that smoothed out its jagged provocations into something more consumable, if not especially memorable.
There’s a strange reverence to how Æon Flux approaches its own liberties. Characters are renamed, relationships softened, and the anarchic philosophical nudges of the original are ironed into something bordering on comprehensible. The animated Æon was a question wrapped in fetish leather and contradiction – forever dying, forever reborn, often undermining her own cause in pursuit of something ineffable. Here, Charlize Theron’s Æon is a grief-stricken freedom fighter with a tragic backstory and a mid-film existential breakthrough. The sex and death symbiosis of the original is nudged aside in favour of emotional closure and cloning conspiracies.
Yet despite all that, there’s something low-key intoxicating about Kusama’s final product. What’s left after the studio interference – after the trimming and sanding – is a whisper of an art film, clad in sci-fi tropes and delivered with an earnestness that’s hard to mock without feeling a little cruel. Studio involvement lingers like a genetic override, quietly rewriting anything too unruly or strange and encoding something more predictable, more palatable to the c-suite suits who measure art with a balance sheet. Æon Flux never quite achieves what it sets out to do, partly because it’s never entirely sure what that is. But within its missteps is a kind of masterpiece of mood that resists dismissal.
The world-building flirts with intrigue – sterile utopia, omnipresent surveillance, rebels in elaborate parkour boots – but rarely dares to get specific. It leans on mood and motion, on dreamlike set design and semi-poetic dialogue. The production design, courtesy of Andrew McAlpine, deserves genuine credit for crafting a future that’s both tactile and dreamlike. Locations feel like they’ve grown out of the ground and been polished by a regime obsessed with symmetry. Costume designer Beatrix Aruna Pasztor crafts a wardrobe that flirts with futurism and formalism, keeping the silhouette sharp even as it softens the more provocative edge of the original. It’s less anarchic dominatrix, more revolutionary runway – but it holds the eye and sketches character in fabric as confidently as any line of dialogue. Even when the plot wavers, the visual language holds your attention. Likewise, the action choreography – particularly a sequence involving grass-triggered mines and a gymnast’s approach to assassination – injects bursts of creativity that briefly recall the original’s anything-goes physicality. The fight scenes may be fewer than advertised, but when they land, they have style and silhouette to spare.
The plot unfurls like a memory being explained back to someone: imperfect, out of order, strangely resonant. It’s more interested in impressions than clarity, which isn’t inherently a problem, except it keeps pausing to deliver exposition with the bluntness of a railway announcement. The tension between its abstract urges and its commercial obligations is palpable, and oddly poignant.
Theron, for her part, plays it almost too straight. There’s no wink, no arched brow to undercut the gravity of the world she’s navigating. She treats the role with the seriousness of someone trying to elevate the material by force of will alone. It doesn’t entirely work, but it gives the film a centre of gravity it desperately needs. She’s matched by Sophie Okonedo bringing a welcome alternative texture to proceedings as Sithandra, anchoring the film’s more eccentric elements with wry physicality and a calm intensity that does a lot of heavy lifting beneath the dialogue. Marton Csokas’ Trevor Goodchild, meanwhile, does his best to inject some ambiguity into a character that’s been re-edited into something between misunderstood genius and clone-happy technocrat while Johnny Lee Miller slithers around the periphery with pantomime menace. Paterson Joseph lends gravitas and steel as a rebel scientist who deserves more screen time, and Frances McDormand radiates authority in a role that could have been silly but ends up vaguely terrifying.
It’s tempting to write Æon Flux off as another victim of studio nervousness – an intriguing idea diluted until it could be safely marketed. And yes, the original cut may well have been bolder, weirder, more faithful to the opaque energy of Chung’s creation. But to do so would be to ignore what survived: a quietly defiant, stylistically cohesive curio that hums along at its own frequency. It’s not the Æon Flux fans were expecting, but it’s not entirely unworthy of the name.
If the animated series posed questions and erased the answers before you could read them, the film answers questions no-one quite asked – but it does so with style, sincerity, and the odd flash of contemplative beauty. It never earns the right to be enigmatic, but it often feels like it wishes it could. Its influences are worn lightly but unmistakably – from the polished decay of Logan’s Run to the sterile menace of Gattaca, and even the outré what-the-fuckery of Zardoz it’s less a direct heir and more an oddly affectionate echo of genre touchstones that also married futurism to fatalism. And if that’s not the most honest encapsulation of early-2000s genre filmmaking, what is?
