Originally released as a series of animated shorts on MTV’s Liquid Television in 1991, Aeon Flux, the brainchild of Korean-American animator Peter Chung, featured stunning visuals and rare dialogue. Aeon Flux quickly drew a cult following and as a result MTV released a season of ten half-hour episodes in 1995. Keeping in tune with Hollywood’s trend of recycling old ideas instead of creating original material, Paramount decided to stick with the formula and re-release Aeon Flux as a full-length movie. Oh, how the mighty have fallen—Chung would be appalled to see what has happened to his once-celebrated series.

The setup is promising: in the year 2001, a virus killed almost all of the world’s population, leaving the rest to live in the walled city of Bregna for the next 400 years, when our story takes place. Our protagonist is assassin Aeon Flux, played by Oscar-winning actress Charlize Theron (The Italian Job, Monster), in a sad combination of a good actress with a bad, bad script. The city is ruled by two men, Trevor and Oren Goodchild (Martin Csokas and Johnny Lee Miller, respectively), who keep the city in a Big-Brother- like state of constant surveillance. To keep an ever-more-complicated plot simple, Flux fights for the Monicas, a group of iconoclasts seeking to take down the Goodchilds.

As you can probably guess, a lot of meaningless violence, tight outfits (after all, Theron is extremely attractive, and costume designer Beatrix Aruna Pasztor certainly knows it), and some pretty amazing visual effects entail. As a matter of fact, that the movie is so visually stunning may be its only redeeming quality. The movie is chock full of stone dialogue (one of the movie’s most memorable lines, said by Flux to her target of assassination, “you killed my family, so I came here to kill you”) is pretty representative of the piece’s writing as a whole. The movie touches upon issues like cloning, surveillance and death, yet they are often glossed over in favor of explosions and gunfire.

Aeon Flux’s major problem is not the movie’s premise, or even its questionable dialogue. The problem is that, for a movie that tries so hard to be futuristic, deep and most importantly, original, it all ends up looking more or less the same as any action movie this past decade. The trailers do Aeon Flux a favor by getting the audience excited for a cutting-edge action-filled film to break the mundane, but as Flux states early on the movie, “everything is not what it seems”. This is the case with Flux, a misguided attempt at something new.