Back in the ’90s, MTV, having some late-night airtime to fill, decided to do it with Liquid Television, a showcase of weird indie animation. It paid off for them in a big way, as it’s how they discovered Beavis And Butt-head, but it also worked with Peter Chung’s Aeon Flux. Chung’s distorted figures performing acrobatic stunts in skimpy leather outfits, bizarre futuristic architecture, zero dialogue, and ending every short by killing the protagonist in some brutal way, was unlike anything that was on the air before or largely since, and, after Charlize Theron and director Karyn Kusama tried to make it a film franchise in 2005, the cartoon is coming back to live action.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, MTV will be changing the plot slightly. The original show was set thousands of years after an ecological collapse and detailed a fight between two former Eastern Bloc states, one “run” by anarchists and the other a police state that pretends to be democratically run. This time around, it’ll be all about the police state, “biohacking,” and superheroics as the heroine becomes the legendary Aeon Flux. Hopefully the biohacking includes cloning, because having the protagonist creatively bite it every time a new short ran really was part of the fun.
That said, it’s very much of its time, and it’ll be a challenge to reboot this in a way that’s faithful to Chung’s original approach. Part of the reason the shorts worked was it explained almost nothing, and the more detail we learned about the world, the tougher it became to keep that mystique. Can a live-action show pull that off, or will it have to go in another direction entirely? We’ll find out as MTV moves forward on the show.
(via Hollywood Reporter)