Taken on its own, ÆON FLUX (2005) is an interesting oddity among post-MATRIX techno-soundtrack sci-fi action movies. The look is clean and brightly lit, the premise is vague, it has some legitimately strange tech and costumes. One of its shootouts happens in a rose garden, another on a manicured lawn beneath blossoming cherry trees. A major third act action set piece involves hanging from and climbing up the gold-lame-scarf tail of a blimp called “The Relical.” To date I think it might be the only movie with a Relical in it.

It’s an MTV Films production, but’s that just because it’s based on a cartoon birthed by their envelope-pushing animation anthology Liquid Television. It doesn’t have any needle drops and doesn’t seem fully invested in being of the time, or of pop culture. If not for the generic beats in the score by Graeme Revell (MIGHTY MORPHIN POWER RANGERS: THE MOVIE) it would feel pretty otherworldly.

It stars Charlize Theron (in one of her first post-Oscar-win-for-MONSTER projects) as Æon Flux, a “Monican spy” rebelling against the regime of Trevor Goodchild (Marton Csokas, SIN CITY: A DAME TO KILL FOR), chairman of Bregna and descendant of the Trevor Goodchild who founded this walled-off conclave after curing the disease that wiped out 99% of the Earth’s population 400 years ago. The place seems nice but lacks freedom; people disappear, and not just dissidents. Æon’s younger sister Una (Amelia Warner, QUILLS) pointedly stays out of politics, but still gets murdered by government goons. So whatever Æon’s trying to do, I support it.

Like her animated counterpart she’s an acrobat and contortionist. She climbs, rappels, flips, rolls, leaps, glides, cartwheels, slinks, crawls like an insect. (Second unit director/stunt coordinator: Charles Croughwell [RAVEN].) Unlike in the cartoon she wears pants (and I miss her big knee shields), but the costumes by Beatrix Aruna Pasztor (EVEN COWGIRLS GET THE BLUES, U-TURN, PSYCHO, MONKEYBONE) still show off Theron’s distinct shapes and movements. The movie is definitely at its best in its early, less explained portions, like when she kisses a passing contact on the street and her tongue reaches into his mouth like an arm, pulls out a capsule that we see in x-ray as it drops down her throat to her stomach, then sends her consciousness to a chamber (actually a historic Berlin animal shelter dissection theater built in 1790) where she receives instructions from her handler (Frances McDormand, DARKMAN).

She and a partner named Sithandra (Sophie Okonedo, HELLBOY 2019), whose feet have been surgically replaced with hands, infiltrate the fortress by skipping across a deadly garden guarded by projectile seeds and razor sharp blades of grass. (Come to think of it, PREDATOR BADLANDS had a part similar to this.) In a hallway she drops a bunch of pinballs and later, when imprisoned, she whistles to summon them. They roll through a vent, form a pyramid and explode through the wall for her. It can’t be denied that this movie has some cool shit in it.

Then there’s the plot, though. When she has the chance to achieve her mission of assassinating Goodchild she doesn’t do it. In fact, she ends up fuckin him. Sure, she almost strangles him while naked, which is pretty Æon. But instead of letting their love/hate relationship be some messy, horny, human shit like in the source material the adapters commit the sin of coming up with an explanation for it. It has to do with cloning, and Trevor actually being a good guy. They have memories of each other in another life. He calls her “Katherine,” and it feels meaningful to her. They team up as his scheming brother Oren (Jonny Lee Miller, DARK SHADOWS) stages a coup, and both become targeted as traitors by their own sides.

The big problem I had when this came out is that as much as I tried I just couldn’t stop my brain from comparing it to the one-of-a-kind work of art it’s based on. Part of that is the medium – Peter Chung’s detailed animation exaggerates and warps faces, bodies and perspectives like no one else. Without a doubt it’s fun to watch Theron and her stunt doubles do some of that stuff in live action, but it could never be the same, could never be as good, as the drawings. There are faces here that look straight out of Chung’s universe (mainly Pete Postlethwaite, ALIEN 3), but I wish they could’ve found one for Trevor. It’s more down to the characterization than to the casting of Csokas, but both are a concession to Hollywood normalcy, trying to jam weirdo Trevor Goodchild into a handsome leading man box, and ending up with just a plain old box. What is the point of a Trevor Goodchild with no weird creep side to him? In the movie his experiments are actually noble, his sex is romantic. The freaky Æon/Trevor chemistry is entirely absent. If this is their take on the character it’s almost not worth including him.

Of course, trying to encompass the spirit of Æon Flux in a big budget feature film is itself a near impossibility, what with the rare amount of creative freedom offered to Chung by MTV and the evolving format of the show. It started in short serialized segments, and eventually became a full half hour show. Though I think director Karyn Kusama (coming off of GIRLFIGHT) has more than proven herself an interesting director, I don’t think Paramount was eager to fly either her or Chung’s freak flags on 2,600 multiplex screens. So they ended up doing something that might be reasonable in most cartoon movie-fications, but not in this one: they tried to make sense of everything, and explain it. The movie tells us what this place is, what year it is, why Æon and Trevor are attracted to each other. They give them pasts. Chung’s Æon could never have a past because she doesn’t even have continuity.

I always loved that no episodes connected, that Æon and Trevor were sometimes lovers, sometimes trying to kill each other. They seem to have different fetishes from episode to episode. Only one episode (“Thanatophobia”) involves erotic spinal surgery. (That’s also the episode with a wall – more of an oppressive Berlin or Gaza situation segregating Bregna from Monica.) I don’t think there is a bible to Æon Flux – it was important for it to always be mutating. It was a canvas for Chung to try out different formal experiments: what if the dialogue is only grunts and gibberish, what if we keep changing to different perspectives, what if Æon dies in every episode. When you commit yourself to turning it into one sensible story you inevitably lose the spirit of the animation.

Here’s a minor example: there’s this cool moment where Æon has been involved in a shootout and then it cuts to a shot from above and you see all the bodies laying around and realize how many people died.

It plays as kind of a cool, funny moment. But it’s probly inspired by a famous scene in the first season where, after we’ve enjoyed Æon running around gunning down Breen soldiers with machine guns, we stop to examine the piles of bodies and people laying, slowly dying, choking on blood. And we think oh, maybe it’s not so cool that she’s doing this. The music got me all riled up but actually this is fucking tragic. It’s much more layered.

I mean, the animated series was always gonna go harder. Una is only in one episode (“Isthmus Crypticus”), and does possibly die, but by being bit by a mite while in flight mating with a humanoid bird called a Seraph-Trev. Even the cool kiss exchange part I mentioned pales in comparison to the scene that inspired it, where Æon and Trevor kiss through windows of passing trains, and Trevor’s tongue opens a compartment in Æon’s tooth and puts a rolled up photo inside it. We know Hollywood isn’t gonna give us bizarro shit like that. It was already a miracle that MTV did.

For whatever it’s worth, Kusama reportedly delivered a very different and longer movie that the studio (who had changed regimes since she started) hated, supposedly considering it “a $50 million art movie.” In a Buzzfeed profile Kusama described having her film taken away and re-edited as “open-heart surgery without the painkillers.” She said that “Huge swatches of storyline, which gave the movie a kind of emotional weight, were completely removed,” and the carefully planned action sequences were hacked to pieces. The studio actually made it into something they hated even more than her version, so they had her come back and try to make more sense out of it, but it still wasn’t what she wanted.

Unsurprisingly Chung also describes the movie in torturous terms, but his complaints start with the Æon and Trevor relationship, which was part of what drew Kusama to the script by Phil Hay & Matt Manfredi (CRAZY/BEAUTIFUL, THE TUXEDO). I definitely believe them that Kusama’s cut was way better, but I’m not sure I would ever be fully on board with this 400 years of clones concept. It’s a good metaphor for the same fucking people controlling the world for generations, but they just use it for a love story. Isn’t it romantic that they were originally a couple in the aughts? If you say so.

I was hoping this stuff wouldn’t bother me with 25+ years of distance, but no such luck. It was still pretty much the same experience: admiration for some of its style and for Theron’s performance buried in disappointment that they couldn’t or didn’t go all the way. It was interesting, though, to revisit with the knowledge that Theron would in fact go on to fulfill the prophecy. At the time I knew her from MIGHTY JOE YOUNG and shit, but this movie made me a fan. I could see that she really cared about the physicality, the poses. Those are some of my favorite actors, the ones like Wesley Snipes or Angelina Jolie who are very good at fancypants dramatic acting but also can and will fully embody a larger than life comic book type of character.

An actor who can crouch on a wall just as well as they can cry. I saw that in Theron in this movie, and that part of her has undoubtedly grown. Now we can watch this knowing that ten years later she was motherfuckin Furiosa. (And then she carried it into ATOMIC BLONDE and THE OLD GUARD.)

I guess I always thought of this as an interesting failure, so I still thought Kusama was someone to watch, and she too has proven that instinct correct. I wish she had a larger filmography but I think THE INVITATION, JENNIFER’S BODY and DESTROYER all prove she’s worth paying attention to. She also stuck with the screenwriters for her future projects and even married one of them, so it wasn’t a total disaster.

I do actually think they could make a better version of this now, but what would be the point of that? Just give the money to Chung to make an animated movie or show, ÆON or otherwise.