In 1991, the most innovative and groundbreaking visual sci-fi around was happening in bite-sized segments, late at night on MTV. If you were awake and you happened to catch it, you would find arresting two-minute action-packed episodes of a series called Æon Flux, which focused on the titular cyberpunkish assassin, who very often, had a bizarre demise. More like impressionistic animated sci-fi art than a true narrative show, the early Æon Flux lacked any real dialogue, and as its creator, Peter Chung, intended, didn’t really tell a unified story. But then, on August 8, 1995, that changed. Instead of abbreviated animated shorts with contradictory narratives, Æon Flux quietly rebooted itself as a full series, and in doing so, changed science fiction and television history. And 30 years later, many of the jarring themes of this series hold up better than anyone could have possibly imagined.
Seemingly drawing inspiration from the hyper-sexualized adult genre magazines like Heavy Metal, the character of Æon Flux herself comes across as a cross between a dominatrix and Trinity from The Matrix’s weirder aunt. But, for all of its sexual aesthetics, it's difficult to call the show exploitative. Its bloodshed is also graphic and unsettling, but in both cases, Æon Flux is, very clearly, making a kind of satire of the very things it depicts: a visual comic-book world that seems taken from Jean Giraud’s concept art from Alejandro Jodorowsky's unmade Dune. In other words, Æon Flux looks like anachronistic science fiction, even for the 1990s.
But in 1995, when the 30-minute episodes started airing and the characters began speaking, the show went from being an artistic statement and morphed into a provocative and deeply prescient science fiction series. Æon Flux takes place in a dystopian-ish future in which two city-states, Monica and Bregna, are constantly at odds. In some ways, Monica and Bregna feel like the districts from The Hunger Games, and in other ways, they feel like starkly different parts of a disjointed Earth, with pieces of William Gibson’s “Sprawl” novels, as well as the trippy book version of Logan’s Run. The basic conflict of the show is mostly ideological: Bregna is a corrupt surveillance state, and Monica is more libertarian.
This might make you think that Æon herself is a kind of freedom fighter, or spy working for the good guys of Monica, and that would be partially true. But the political twists of the show are far less black-and-white. In the very first of the full-length episodes, “Utopia or Deuteranopia?” it seems that Æon is fighting against the corrupt leader, Trevor Goodchild, and wants to reinstate Bregna’s elected leader, Clavius. But by the end of the episode, things get muddy. Æon has an ongoing relationship with Trevor, despite fighting against him, and Clavius turns out to be straight-up insane, to the point of being totally unfit to lead. Mixed into all of this is the constant surveillance of every aspect of life, which Trevor sells to the public in the spirit of “openness.”
In microcosm, this episode tells you everything you need to know about the series: There are no easy answers to the questions of who is good and who is bad on the show. And Æon’s motivations aren’t 100 percent idealistic, nor is she as corrupt and amoral as Trevor.
Instead, the brilliance of Æon Flux is that it’s a deeply messy science fiction future, one in which people readily give up their freedoms in favor of omnipresent technology. The sexual imagery and fetishism of the series are, in some ways, more of a bug than a feature of the show, and though somewhat over-the-top by modern standards, are, for better or worse, part of the complete package.
The legacy of Æon Flux today is kind of a mixed bag. The 2005 live-action movie, starring Charlize Theron, is an unmitigated catastrophe, and sadly, fails to capture the moral ambiguity and stylish attitude that made the series so memorable. As of 2021, there was talk of a new Æon Flux reboot series on Paramount+, but nothing has fully materialized yet. And even if a new version of the series does ever happen, it will be difficult to top the raw, aggressive quality of the original. In 1995, Æon Flux arrived in its best format at that time. There will never be anything quite like it again.
How to stream Æon Flux
For the uninitiated, the streaming order of Æon Flux might seem slightly confusing. On Paramount+, you’ll see that “Season 1” begins with the full-length episode “Utopia or Deuteranopia?” Technically, this is the beginning of “Season 3” in 1995. The earlier shorts have been grouped together into Season 1 and Season 2, which are not streaming on Paramount+. To get all the Æon Flux episodes, before 1995, you’ll have to purchase the show on Apple TV+, Amazon, or elsewhere.
