What happened to 'Aeon Flux'? Here's why the 2005 film didn't capture the 1990s show.
Turning a beloved animated series into live action is always tricky. For every One Piece success, there’s something like the 2010 film version of Avatar: The Last Airbender, a complete calamity. But arguably, the adaptation process gets trickier with source material that edges into the transgressive. So, in 2005, when the 1990s dark, animated cyberpunk series Aeon Flux became a movie starring Charlize Theron, something strange happened. Instead of being a scandalous movie with edgy morals and an amoral, complex protagonist, the film delivered something much safer and tamer.
Is the 2005 Aeon Flux worth watching today? Yes and no. For fans of The Hunger Games or Divergent, this version of Aeon Flux will feel like a soft predecessor to those more popular soaptopias. But, for fans of the original, this version bore no resemblance to the eponymous heroine of the late-night MTV series that started in 1991.
While the original series featured a slightly amoral connection between Aeon and the character Trevor Goodchild, the film makes things a little messier by toning down some of the more sexual aspects of their relationship. While the series had Aeon manipulating Trevor for various reasons, including some surveillance goals, the film makes things a little more cut-and-dried. As in the show, there are two city-states, Monica and Bregna, with Bregna being the more metropolitan one, and Monica being the place that’s a bit more country. And, like in the show, Aeon is, technically, an agent operating in Bregna, but working for Monica.
But the fact that the movie carries this superficial detail over to its basic structure is somewhat meaningless. Because even if Aeon Flux had followed all the plot points from the various episodes of the show (which, honestly, wouldn’t even be possible), that isn’t what made the movie version a failure. The problem with the Aeon Flux movie isn’t the casting; obviously, Charlize Theron is great. The true problem is that the concept and aesthetic of Aeon Flux is surreal and unsettling, and the movie is about as conventional as you can imagine. A series about moral grey areas and strange relationships in a distant future instead became a more straightforward 2005 spy movie, which felt like a pilot for a lukewarm live-action TV series. Or, perhaps more charitably, if you’d never heard of the 1990s animated show, you might have thought Aeon Flux was just a misguided Matrix ripoff.
As Aeon Flux creator Peter Chung put it in 2010: “[The filmmakers] will soften it for the public, which isn't hip enough to appreciate the raw, pure, unadulterated source...”
This is the basic issue: Aeon Flux is great because it’s weird and raw. The 2005 movie is strangely conventional, playing out like a self-contained story on a planet that you can imagine Doctor Who or Star Trek visiting in a weekly episode, but not sticking around to see what happens next.
In the first run of Aeon Flux shorts, the lead character, bizarrely enough, dies in each episode. She later dies in various other episodes in the series, too. Yes, this can be explained away because she’s been cloned a few times (which happens in the movie too), but there’s something about the bizarre nature of her constant dying in the show that made it so exciting and weird. In contrast, Theron’s version feels more grounded, and thus more constant and reliable. Which, in many other sci-fi worlds, wouldn’t be a bad thing. But in the world of Aeon Flux, her possible impending (and repetitive) demise is one of the things that gave the show life. Instead, the live-action take on the show was paradoxically lifeless.
Aeon Flux (2005) is available to rent on YouTube, Prime Video, and elsewhere. The original series streams on Paramount+.
