Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Athena’ on Netflix, A Brutally Intense, Realistic Action-Drama Keying on Our Fear of Civil Unrest

Netflix’s Athena feels more like a feat than a movie. You know, like Herzog dragging a steamship over a mountain or Miller dropping a battalion of monstercars into the middle of the desert or Coppola weathering a typhoon and Brando’s whims. Romain Gavras (The World is Yours, Our Day Will Come) directs this rivetingly intense political action-drama with such intent and purpose, he’s almost daring us to look away. Sitting here in the rubble of my post-Athena self, I feel compelled to say it may just be THE filmmaking achievement of 2022.

ATHENA: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Abdel (Dali Benssalah) is a military war hero from the Athena projects and the brother of Idir, a 13-year-old boy beaten to death by police. At a press conference, he calls for calm but his other brother Karim (Sami Slimane) is seething with rage in the back and tosses a molotov cocktail and proceeds to lead a massive throng of young angry men on a rampage through police headquarters and they smash a car through the doors and loot weapons and break things and toss papers around and light fires and toss papers in the air and launch handheld fireworks at cops in riot gear and steal a police truck and careen out the building and drive the wrong way on the highway back to Athena where a civilian army is assembled for a siege against the impending arrival of police forces with shields and helmets and armor and batons and shotguns and tear gas, and Karim is not afraid.

Abdel cannot convince Karim to back down. Abdel hurries through the housing complex and urges the resident families, many of them of Algerian origin, to evacuate. He enters a room full of people mourning Idir, including his mother, and pauses to pray with a nervous look in his eye because the sound of chaos outside threatens to swallow them all. Elsewhere, a third brother, Moktar (Ouassini Embarek), walks with a small cadre of thug-bodyguards, protecting the large amounts of cocaine in his possession; they hole up in a space adjacent to the calamity. On a rooftop, Karim leads his soldiers, bellowing orders as they continue a firework assault and toss a refrigerator off the building towards an assembly of cops. A tear gas canister clatters to the ground nearby and Karim snatches it and it explodes in his hand as he tosses it away but he continues on as if the blood and pain his body suffers is nothing compared to the pain of losing his brother to an awful, senseless, racist attack.

On a police truck, Jerome (Anthony Bajon) nervously scratches blue nail polish from his fingernails, painted by his twin four-year-old girls. Doesn’t matter – he’ll wear gloves as his forces encroach upon Athena. The cops scale fire truck ladders to the top of the complex like it’s a medieval attack on a castle. Forces clash and the Athena men drag a cop inside but several cops rush in after him and save him. The cops assemble with shields above their heads and around their perimeter like the 300 Spartans, blocking the barrage of bottle rockets and stones and bottles. Karim walks toward the cops and tosses a massive molotov cocktail at them and it bursts and cops burn and scatter. One of them is Jerome, who coughs and hacks and makes his way through the smoke and turns right and left and right and left and left again and sheds his police gear and steals a sweatshirt and tries to get away but he’s caught and beaten and dragged to Karim, who facetimes the cops and says he’ll Kill Jerome unless they name the men who murdered Idir and give them life sentences.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Gavras draws tonal operatic sensibilities and the revolution-in-the-streets context from Les Miserables (he co-writes with Ladj Ly, who wrote and directed the gritty, modernist adaptation of Victor Hugo’s story in 2019), and his breathless visual style from Alfonso Cuaron, specifically Roma and, more directly, Children of Men.

Performance Worth Watching: Benssalah gets more screen time and a greater dramatic arc, and is consistently excellent. But Slimane is the charismatic and confident heart of the film, having carved his character from pure, undiluted righteousness.

Memorable Dialogue: Karim’s men chant: “We’re the police! We’re the police! We’re the police!”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Athena is a visceral, unshakeable, operatic, morally fraught work of visual virtuosity, brutal violence and wild, unkempt emotion. It’s an exquisitely choreographed action movie, a family drama and a political screed. Even in the way Gavras pulls his punches thematically in the final harrowing stretch, smearing the clearly delineated lines of its conflicting parties – police vs. citizens, brother vs. brother – feels realistic. And tragic.

Gavras’ technique is marvelous. We inhale, lose ourselves in an 11-minute, ferociously conceived and coordinated tracking shot, then gasp when a symphony of violence concludes with a merciful cut. And that’s just the first scene. The filmmaker cunningly shifts points-of-view without edits, moves into position for iconographic shots and pulls off how’d-he-DO-that camera maneuvers – but he never loses track of the despair that drives his characters to act with such violent desperation.

Without the director’s dextrous visual artistry, Athena might be yet another grim what-if scenario drawn from the Western world’s political tinderbox of racism, grievous division and corrupt authority. He broadstrokes Abdel and Karim’s anguish until their conflict is thrust far beyond melodrama to classical tragedy; he complicates ideology while simultaneously stripping our spirits raw, until we yearn for these people to just stop hurting each other, to just get along. But Karim, especially, is beyond that, beyond reason, down to the slashing, frostbitten rage that, in the current ideological environment, seems so painfully… probable.

Our Call: Athena is fierce – and unforgettable. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.