Athena - Movie Review

Critics Score - 7 of 10

General Audience Score - 8 of 10

In the world of Ancient Greece, as a daughter of Zeus, Athena was known as being the goddess of wisdom and war, among her many qualities. While she is most commonly associated with the capital city of Greece, Athens, the name Athena is also an area in the city of Paris where the fictional events from a new film take place. Athena is a primarily French language film that debuted on Netflix last September without much fanfare that many audiences are just now catching up with after France went with Saint Omer for its submission to this years Oscars. Athena is a roller coaster ride of a movie, and if you can tell anything from the incredible poster, being named after the goddess of war is no small coincidence. This films is like Avatar The Way Of Water in that it is a complete spectacle of filmmaking, but the story, while engaging in the moment, is somewhat shallow and because it doesn’t spend enough time with the characters, feels a little undercooked. With that being said, this film moves at a breakneck speed and is over almost as soon as the opening sequence begins. The little over an hour and a half runtime flies by, before you have time to catch your breath the credits are rolling, the entertainment value is off the charts. If you’re a fan of foreign cinema, Athena is one fight you don’t want to miss.

SYNOPSIS - Our trip into what we’re left to assume is a Paris suburb starts with one amazing long take, it was actually stitched together from several shots but it’s incredibly seamless and runs over ten minutes before cutting away. But as the camera turns on, we watch Abdel (Dali Benssalah) dressed in a French soldiers uniform, with his red baret and camo jacket, as he walks down a corridor of a police station and out into a room full of reporters. We ominously hear in the background one reporter saying, “The third case of police brutality in two months rocks the country.” The camera stays right in front of Abdel as he begins to tell us and the reporters that his little brother, Idir, died a little after midnight, they have yet to identify the police involved in his murder but that justice will be served. As someone else begins speaking, the camera turns away from the soldier and begins moving through the crowd, the shot finally settling on the face of an unshaven Karim (Sami Slimane) with his long hair pulled back into a pony tail. The camera pans down and a man flicks his lighter and holds it to a bottle with a rag stuffed in it and Karim chucks a Molotov cocktail into a corner of the room which explodes and triggers all hell to break loose. As I mentioned, this movie kicks off at a break neck speed because we’re basically thrown headfirst into a war zone, the parties involved and the reason for the fighting, we do not know.

As the film continues we’re able to make a little more sense of the chaos as it unfolds almost constantly before our eyes. Without pushing too far into the modest plot, an attack on the police station erupts, as the dock fills with smoke and rioters, the camera comes back to and swirls around Abdel as he shouts for the man behind this attack who also happens to be his brother. But these rioters aren’t just pillaging this police location for kicks. In France, access to guns is extremely limited to the general public. The camera catches back up with the cocktail tossing Karim and he yells, “Find the weapons!”, until down a hallway a man brings him back to a locker, which they have no tools to open. Karim gives the word for a couple of the young men that are ransacking the station to take the entire safe out, which they carry as a police van with all its doors flying open backs up to them. About eight or nine rioters including Karim jump on board for a police van joy ride, with young men hanging on wherever they can find a hand hold to grab. After a minute of driving with several dirt bikes doing wheelies alongside the vehicle, they arrive at the district, get out of the vehicle and take their positions looking out over an overpass. A drone shot takes us up in the air and the big bold letters of the films title Athena hit the screen as the original score vocals and bass shakes us off the edge of the seats we’re on. Unfortunately the way the story was constructed was a bit problematic and were kept guessing as to who all the characters are and their motivations are unknown, even as the movie enters the third act and pieces of the puzzle fall into place, the film still maintains a disjointed feeling though the duration.

Speaking purely from being a visual spectacle, Athena is up there with Decision To Leave and Top Gun, all of them a few steps behind Avatar, but among the best that 2022 had to offer. It utilizes some truly technically impressive long takes, the camera slickly cruising around the area this film inhabits making you wonder how some of these shots were captured. But being pretty doesn’t always translate to great filmmaking, if the story doesn’t land, well, you may just start a riot on your hands. The direction is also precise, the work of Romain Gavras was more than impressive, unfortunately he also has a writing credit for the film, and the screenplay is what fails the film. But with his directing sensibilities, Gavras clearly has an eye for the camera and is able to generate some stunning takes, with some better source material, he could really make something special one day. The pacing is incredible, it whizzes by at such speed that the film sustains a high entertainment value but sells the movie short as we’re left soon forgetting these characters and their motivations because we just didn’t get to spend much time with them. It’s unfortunate, although the dialogue is mostly fine, and these actors, especially Sami Slimane, are all able to hold their own, that these characters lacked any depth and we can’t invest in characters we don’t know and care about. The original score is a scorching upbeat mix of tense violin, drums, bass, and vocals which help keep up the pace with the blistering speed of the rest of the film. With it’s impressive long takes and action sequences, Athena feels like distant cousin to Children Of Men, but at a ten minute shorter runtime, it just doesn’t leave us with nearly as much to take away.

SUMMARY - This film will sweep you off your feet and take you on a ride like not many films can. The finale might be interesting, it seems like it wants to say something deep or meaningful but much like Athena, it doesn’t leave you with much more than an empty battlefield full of death and despair.