With Women Of Action,Caroline Siede digs into the history of women-driven action movies to explore what these stories say about gender and how depictions of female action heroes have evolved over time
Back in the early 2000s, Æon Flux seemed like a surefire thing for Paramount Pictures. It starred Charlize Theron in her first big action leading role after her blockbuster success in The Italian Job and her Oscar-winning turn in Monster. It was directed by Sundance darling Karyn Kusama, who had already discovered future action star Michelle Rodriguez in her acclaimed boxing drama Girlfight. And it was based on an MTV animated cult hit with a built-in fanbase. What could possibly go wrong?
A lot, it turns out, although to simply dismiss Æon Flux as “bad” doesn’t quite capture the spirit of just how outrageous it actually is. This is a movie in which Sophie Okonedo casually reveals that she’s been genetically modified to have hands for feet and proceeds to fight killer blades of grass while Theron slithers across the ground like a lizard. Though Æon Flux opens with two separate exposition dumps that try to orient the audience to its dystopian future, the plot often feels like sand slipping through your fingers—probably because Paramount took control of the final edit away from Kusama and attempted to transform her sci-fi art film into a mainstream PG-13 action blockbuster.
In fact, Kusama herself has called Æon Flux “a real fuck-job of a movie.” While she and her crew had filmed a mature, emotional action epic in the vein of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Paramount wound up turning the movie into a video game-y Matrix knock-off that flopped at the box office and sits at just 10% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. It was a bomb so bad it reverberated across the careers of everyone involved. It would be another decade until Theron truly transformed herself into an action star with Mad Max: Fury Road. And for Kusama’s part, the entire sordid history of Æon Flux is essentially one big cautionary tale about how Hollywood treats its rising female directors—particularly when they try to make a name for themselves in the action genre.
As Kusama laid out in a fascinating 2016 BuzzFeed profile, despite the critical acclaim of Girlfight, she struggled to get a sophomore feature funded at all. “My instinct is being an antisocial woman who maybe seems like she had a chip on her shoulder, or seems like she’d be really hard to work with, or maybe seems slightly crazy—that doesn’t seem like a good thing,” Kusama joked. “But I feel like there’s a promise, this like whiff of excitement, around men who display those traits, as if there’s a secret to all of it. Women don’t get that free pass.”
No one would bite on her script for a gender-bending sci-fi character study, and she felt a general sense of hostility from Hollywood. After being sent the script for Paramount’s take on Æon Flux, Kusama decided to meet with the studio just for the experience. She prepped storyboards to convey her vision, a level of preparedness that impressed the studio executives. They offered her the gig and she found a particular champion in chairwoman Sherry Lansing, who liked her more arthouse take on the material—even as Paramount lowered the budget from $110 million to closer to $55 million. (At the time, Kathryn Bigelow was still the only woman to have helmed a $100 million movie with 2002’s K-19: The Widowmaker.)
Since the original animated series had little plot but lots of style, screenwriters Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi decided they wanted to do “the craziest version of this movie possible, something really, genuinely weird.” They refashioned the story into a “cerebral action-romance” between Theron’s political rebel Æon Flux and Marton Csokas’ Trevor Goodchild, the autocratic leader who maintains peace in a walled-off city state that houses the five million humans who managed to survive a deadly virus 400 years ago. Kusama brought the story to life with intentional pacing, operatic romanticism, and carefully choreographed action sequences that often unfolded in long takes.
Though Theron suffered a severe neck injury just 10 days into shooting, production rolled ahead with the full support of Paramount. Then came a very unlucky bit of timing: Lansing decided to step down from her role at the studio during the movie’s postproduction period. The new execs weren’t so thrilled to discover what kind of sci-fi movie they had inherited. “We heard it come down: ‘This is a $50 million art movie,’” Hay explained to BuzzFeed. “And we were like, ‘That sounds great to me!’ But that’s not what the current regime had signed up for.”
In fact, Paramount was so frustrated that they kicked Kusama off the project and hired a new team of editors to rework her footage into an entirely different kind of movie—something more akin to the Resident Evil and Underworld franchises that were just starting to take off in Hollywood. The studio cut subplots, trimmed away a supporting character’s queerness, and re-edited Kusama’s action sequences into a frenetic mess of quick-cut incoherence. “Huge swatches of storyline, which gave the movie a kind of emotional weight, were completely removed,” Kusama explained. “The emotional core of things was always being questioned as sentimental, over-romantic, short of literally saying the words ‘female’ or ‘feminine.’”
As one of the few female directors who had ever gotten the chance to helm a big studio action movie, Kusama had no playbook to follow when it came to how to fight for her vision. “I felt like I was having, like, open-heart surgery without the painkillers,” she explained. “I just didn’t have anyone who could advocate for why it was important that they treat me better.” Ironically, however, Paramount’s recut version of Æon Flux was so incomprehensible, they actually rehired Kusama to bring some sort of emotional continuity back to the project. But—in one of the ultimate acts of filmmaking indignity—the studio wouldn’t allow her to be alone with the editor because they didn’t trust her not to just revert the movie to her original vision. “I definitely got pushed to a place where it was harder and harder for me to be reasonable,” Kusama told BuzzFeed. “It was a little bit like, ‘Is this what you say to all the girls?’”
Of course, plenty of male directors have been subjected to the whims of studio reedits. And it’s easy to romanticize a version of Æon Flux that’s never seen the light of day. (For his part, original creator Peter Chung didn’t like the original script either, and Theron has said she was already worried the film was going to flop during shooting.) But it’s hard not to feel like we’re missing out on a much more interesting “Kusama Cut” when you look at the strength of the rest of her filmography, which includes the cult hit Jennifer’s Body in 2009, the taut thriller The Invitation in 2015, the Nicole Kidman vehicle Destroyer in 2018, and the Yellowjackets pilot in 2021.
As is, Æon Flux sits somewhere between so-bad-it’s-good and just plain bad, with some undeniable glimmers of something genuinely compelling in there too. Revisiting it for this column mostly just made me think about how much faith it takes to be an actor in a sci-fi property—you’ve got to commit to bonkers costumes and over-the-top dialogue without knowing whether the final product will wind up feeling like The Fifth Element or, well, Æon Flux.
To her credit, Theron commits with aplomb. Her background as a ballet dancer serves her well during the film’s slinky, acrobatic action scenes. And there’s a striking quality to the overall aesthetic of the film, which combines Asian-inspired futurism with Eastern European brutalism. Though the CGI is often rough in that glossy early 2000s way, Kusama and her team scouted some fantastic architecture in their Berlin and Potsdam shooting locations. So while Æon Flux isn’t particularly cohesive, it is visually distinctive—and that’s at least something.
Its biggest problem is tone. For a movie that opens with a woman catching a fly with her eyelashes (a direct homage to a shot from the animated series), Æon Flux just isn’t very much fun to watch. Within the first 10 minutes, Æon French kisses a guy to transfer a bit of tech, telepathically communicates with a steampunk Frances McDormand, and scampers across a rooftop in a white Lycra bodysuit. Yet the movie is so portentous and somber that it’s hard to get caught up in the madness. The big weaponized grass fight is memorable because it’s the rare moment where the movie is actually having fun with its over-the-top worldbuilding.
That seriousness is especially odd given that the original animated series relied on a wry, kinky sense of humor. The live-action adaptation loses that almost entirely. In fact, there’s a wooden quality to most of the supporting performances, which may have started as some kind of commentary on living in a dystopian “utopia” but quickly become exhausting. For every gonzo moment of creativity, there are at least two stilted info dumps, only a handful of which actually contain interesting ideas.
Indeed, after many twists and turns, it’s eventually revealed that (spoiler alert) curing the deadly virus left the surviving humans infertile and the Goodchild family has been secretly cloning its population over and over again over the past 400 years. It’s a wild swing that would no doubt have been even more central to Kusama’s artier, more emotional take on the material. Still, it at least adds some heft to the compromised final product. Æon gets closure for her sister’s murder by learning she’s been reborn as an infant. (You can’t call that one an action movie cliché!) And she discovers that she and Trevor are drawn to one another because they’re essentially “reincarnated” 21st-century lovers who have retained fragments of their old memories through the cloning process.
In the end, Æon Flux is too weird to be written off as a simple flop, even if it’s not quite weird enough to enjoy a true cult resurgence (although some have reclaimed it that way). Instead, its biggest legacy is about who gets to try and fail in Hollywood—something key to how both Theron and Kusama reflect on the film. As Theron told The Hollywood Reporterin 2020, “Unfortunately, the very sad truth of any film in the [action] genre with a female lead, when they don’t succeed, there is this mindset of, ‘Well, if it doesn’t work, you just don’t touch it again.’ A lot of women don’t get a second chance, but when men make these movies and fail miserably, they get chance after chance after chance to go and explore that again.” Citing the full decade it took to finally relaunch herself as an action star, she added, “It’s not a very forgiving genre when it comes to women.”
Kusama echoed that frustration to BuzzFeed, noting that for female directors, “each movie represents some kind of finality, potentially, to their career, as opposed to the sense of you have hits, and you have misses. That’s called being an artist. I’m very conscious of how frequently great artists in film who are male and are also generally called ‘big personalities’ get to fail.”
Thankfully, Æon Flux wasn’t the end for Kusama (although she still sometimes struggles to get studios to support her vision) or for Theron, who’s refashioned herself into one of the biggest female action stars working today. But it was certainly a major setback for both of them—one that stands in contrast to, say, Ryan Reynolds starring in four critically reviled comic book movies before getting a chance to make Deadpool,or Jon Favreau going right from his Zathura box office flop to Iron Man. As the saying goes, women in Hollywood have to do everything the men do but backwards and in heels. And when it comes to the action genre, sometimes they have to do it on their hand-feet.
Next time: While Æon Flux flopped, the Resident Evil franchise was on the rise
