Æon Flux (2005)

Æon Flux emerges from 2005, a year when a dystopian science fiction film could still be brisk. Charlize Theron plays the title operative, a warrior in a walled city named Bregna, and Karyn Kusama directs. A female action lead paired with a female director is the film's clearest claim on progressive sensibilities, and it is a modest claim. Æon battles a congress of male scientists, kills efficiently, and is never obliged to explain herself. The studio then took the picture from Kusama and recut it, softening the character's edge. The auteurist grievance is genuine. The cultural one is thinner.

The cast is multiracial, with Sophie Okonedo, Caroline Chikezie, and Paterson Joseph in supporting roles, though the film never comments on race and treats the diversity as scenery. The plot pits the Monican rebellion against an authoritarian council of technocrats, which lends an anti-establishment streak without any critique of capital. A virus has destroyed the Earth and left a single walled city standing. That is apocalyptic furniture, not an environmental argument. The film is too busy with chases to moralize about the planet.

The film's omissions are equally instructive. It contains no LGBTQ characters, no body-positivity messaging, no neurodivergent figures, and no revisionist account of real history. It is set in 2415 and concerns clones, infertility, and a dirigible full of DNA. Its politics are presentational: a woman in the lead, a mixed ensemble around her, and a rebellion against elites. It lectures nobody. Critics savaged it, audiences shrugged, and Peter Chung, who created the animated original, called it a travesty. We are inclined to agree with him on the merits while noting that the film's cultural footprint is faint. It is progressive by casting and conservative by temperament, a combination that has largely vanished from the multiplex.