Athena

Powerful, and brilliantly full of cinematic visual energy.

"Athena" succeeds from the first 10 mins continuous shot in the opening scene to soak you in with its fast pace, and ongoing tension that pushes you on the edge and doesn't fail to blow your mind with its climactic chaotic beauty and changing emotions.

Simple story executed big with great performances. I would've loved to see a bit more depth in the story, It would've strengthened the premise and given it further narrative depth than the stylistic approach, which I didn't mind much.

The cinematography is the strongest element of the movie, the visuals were striking!! It's highly impressive on the technical level, the camera work delivered such an incredible dynamic immersion that transformed you into the action.

ATHENA is an urban war movie with a political touch by Romain Gavras who follows the lead of his father -the Greek well known director and screenplay writer- Costa Gavras. The film is all about how the lives of 3 French siblings with an Algerian descent immerse into chaos after the death of the fourth younger brother under unclear circumstances. The pain of the loss becomes rage and then... BOOM! Everything explodes at ATHENA building complex in Paris and the social strife begins. Although the film has all the necessary elements to be mentioned as a contemporary Greek tragedy and besides the insane long take opening scene it also has a lot of weak spots and blurry motives.

This is very good. The initial scene is one of the best intros...in the cinema history. As simple as that. Technically the film is always great and one of those that I would really have preferred to watch in a cinema room. Unfortunately, Netflix doesn't want that.

I see some people criticising the plot or the script. Well, the plot is good IMO. For a film that happens in one night I think it touches in many things and isn't even politically correct (a lot of the spectators would have preferred to blame only the police because for them is always white and black). The script is...honestly, good enough? Yeah, some dialogue is not that great, but what do you think would be the real dialogue in a situation like this one? Do you really know how these people or most people usually speak in these scenarios?

A very good film. Really surprised to see this is the first film of one of the main actors and one of those films that will force me to watch previous films of this director.

Athena is a bleak, almost dystopian look at the near future of France, a country familiar with racial tensions. We follow three brothers: Karim, a revolutionary leader of the community in revolt, Athena (Salimane), Abdel, a respected military man (Dessalah), and Moktar, a drug dealer (Embarek), as they reel from the death of their brother Idir, at the hands of police.

The death, supposedly the third in one month, leads to an uprising reminiscent of the 1871 Paris Commune, where the city essentially seceded from France for a year. Athena follows the chaos and starts with possibly the best intro of 2022: a blistering, intense one take that introduces the movie with an incredible bang. It's so good I've watched the intro itself three times.

But Athena doesn't let up from there; this isn't a movie that bogs itself down in drama and conversation. It's high octane, kinetic, and a feast for the senses. This is a gorgeous movie; the cinematography so perfectly captures the chaos and finds beauty in it. There are literal shots from this movie that I could see being album covers. The music is epic; orchestral mixed with booming synth that gives this very contemporary story a timelessness. It's as if we're watching an ancient siege take place in the 21st century. I can't gush enough about the amazing music, especially that sinister main theme.

The performances are also excellent; Salimane and Dessalah in particular convey a lot with their facial expressions; I fully understood the dynamics of their complicated relationship even though they shared the screen together quite briefly.

When I first watched Athena, I was a bit disappointed by the lack of substance to the story; while we get clues as to why the anger that is displayed in the film - the anger of immigrant communities vis a vis their interactions with the police in suburban Paris - the world we're entering isn't *fully* disclosed to us.

There are also some plot developments that I don't think make a ton of sense, and the movie begins to falter a bit for me by Act III. There's a plot development and we're sort of rushed into a the third act; the people I watched this movie with were shocked the movie was ending so quickly. It felt like we could've and should've gotten more.

But, the fact that I could watch this movie with others and know they'd be entertained is kind of a miracle. The French tend to make films about their society collapsing along racial and religious lines quite a bit. It's something I would never really expect to see from American filmmakers, and it's incredible to see it so often from France (I'm thinking of movies like Frontieres, Les Miserables etc.).

If you want to introduce audiences to French cinema, you really can't get better than Athena. It's an incredible, accessible, and very rewatchable movie. I highly recommend it, because I guarantee you're probably not going to see anything like it.

...too much of everything. It makes the impression that the director and the d.o.p. Were working for their reel and their reputation instead for the film. The long shots, the fire works, the steadycam shots, the drone shots...everything is kinda used all the time and frequently without serving any purpose except of being there and looking cool. And thats the biggest problem of the film. It feels like the wet dream of any music video director, but not like an generic and authentic film. It lacks of bravery to look ugly...sure it looks good if a dude on a horse is riding through the smoke weaving the french flag in the middle of a revolt...but does it really need to be there?