ATOMIC BLONDE

Erin Teachman
Aug 8, 2017 · 8 min read

Way back in the early days of the year 2000, I ventured to the newly (re)minted capital city of the country I had been living in for about five months. It was for a special class and I would get a grade for it, so it seemed like a good thing to do. And I would get to spend some time with my friends on a crazy extended college grade field trip. Win. Win. The program was intense. Every day we walked for hours, getting in-depth tours of every aspect of this city . . . ok, it’s Berlin. I was living in Germany, in Munich, and we spent 10 days in Berlin in February of 2000. We dug deep into Berlin less than a decade after unification, less than a year after the government was supposed to be finished moving in. Staring out at the city from the roof of the deliberately still bullet-ridden Bundestag building with the beautiful glass dome, under the watchful gaze of the Friedensengel, we declared Berlin “The City of a Thousand Cranes.” We all had the sense that history was being made around us in this vibrant and beautiful city that was bent on inscribing history into itself, a city run by people completely aware that they had been and still were a beacon of hope to the world as it recovered from the end of a long period of excruciating tension. Like David Percival, a character in the movie that I promise I am going to talk about: “I fucking love Berlin.”

I know, I know. “Erin, why the fuck are you talking about shit that’s 17(!) years ago and is so definitely not in this movie where Charlize Theron is supposed to kick ass, talk about the ASS-KICKING, jerk!” Yes, I am a jerk, but a movie critic is the sum of the experiences parked in that seat in front of that movie screen and we wrestle with what the movie does to us. I cannot, cannot, cannot see a film about Berlin at the exact time when the Berlin Wall was coming down (my first memory of a world beyond the borders of the United States, btdubs) and judge that movie dispassionately or rationally. You cannot trust me to tell you the truth about Atomic Blonde. I don’t know the objective truth about this movie. Because I fucking love Berlin and so does Atomic Blonde. I fucking love Atomic Blonde.

Atomic Blonde takes place in the truly chaotic days just before Erich Honecker opened the German border (you can see it happen on TV in the background, one of the great ways this movie handles exposition — real, vintage TV news and not clunky dialogue), when East Germans were protesting every day and loads of people were getting out of the DDR, sorry, GDR, oh, fuck it East Germany = DDR in German, deal, going to Hungary and Czechoslavkia and then getting back into West Germany. It takes place in the intelligence underworld on the front, front, front lines of the collision between empires. It was a Cold War, but Berlin was a hot hot zone of wild espionage activity. Lorraine Braughton, yes that’s Charlize, has to go to Berlin to sort out the biggest intelligence catastrophe since before someone stole the NOC list. Atomic Blonde is actually a spiritual cousin of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Mission: Impossible and every other ice cold spy thriller where you never completely know who is on your side and really what is a side? Where intelligence and espionage are relentlessly personal and the great power bullshit gets set aside in the rough and tumble world where survival is the only rule. Bridge of Spies shows us the slightly off-kilter and kooky world of polite fictions where people’s lives are traded during the Cold War. Atomic Blonde is set in a time when the polite fictions were burning to the ground.

The most intact version of the Wall you could find in 2010.

Atomic Blonde is very much of Berlin circa 1989, but the cruel trick is that it is extremely difficult for filmmakers to re-create Berlin circa 1989. The vast majority of the Wall (which encircled West Berlin) has been reduced to a 2-bricks wide memorial snaking around the city (an extremely rewarding walking experience in Berlin is to make your way to Potsdamer Platz, maybe even visit the Hotel Esplanade, now cased in glass beneath the curved roof of the Sony Center, about as un-punk as you can imagine, and follow that line wherever it might take you).

The Palast, the TV tower, the Dom, me and few friends, back in the day.

At one point, Charlize’s Lorraine is on the roof of a building on Alexanderplatz, beneath the famous TV tower that so irritated the Commies because the spherical section at the top reflects the sun over the city in the form of a cross, looking out over the Berliner Dom (a Protestant cathedral — Berlin is a fucking interesting city, lady) and name checks the Palast der Republik, even though it’s be gone for years (it’s being replaced by a re-creation of the Stadtschloss, which is fine because the Palast was UGLY). Friedrichshain has been tarted up considerably since the shabby days before the wall fell. 1989 Berlin is just plain gone, gone, gone. Atomic Blonde’s filmmakers do their level best to make physical sense of the geography of the real Berlin, as it was, which might as well be on Mars for most American viewers (and had to be filmed in Budapest or on the lot at Babelsberg film studios).

Ok, so, yeah, I’ve bored you enough with the geography of Berlin, let’s talk about the ass-kicking. Atomic Blonde is not an action movie. I can’t stress that enough. The action is brutal, but the plot does not exist as a vehicle for delivering violence: the plot is about managing to be human in a time and place and profession where, structurally, that is nearly impossible. Each fight, each flash of violence happens because of what Lorraine needs to be doing and the people who need to stop her from doing that. Most of these fights, and indeed, most of the movie is set to some of the greatest hits of the 1980s. Forget that Personal Jesus/Black Skinhead mashup from the trailers. Some of these 80’s greats are washed through a modern interpretation but the music is completely rooted in the period (the original music is from Tyler Bates). Even that fight with the polizei is set to music diegetically; Lorraine turns on a tape player to cover up the sounds of her movements. I sincerely hope that Charlize carefully beating up and not killing German policeman to George Michaels’ “Father Figure” becomes the subject of a number of think pieces in the future.

Still. There is that fight, the one EVERYONE is talking about, the stair fight . . . Well, it’s the most important fight in the film, the one with all the stakes, so the film takes plenty of time to set it up. When that fight happens (deeep into the 3rd act), it is majestic. There is no underscoring whatsoever ever, the only sound is of fists and feet and guns and knives. Take away the pop music and violence is even more personal and visceral; you can’t pretend that it is anything but pain. The camera moves like a person in the fight, a person focused on entirely on Lorraine and what she can see and when she can see it. It’s an astonishing act of virtuosity. David Leitch is one half of the team that brought us John Wick (I mean, if you’re this far in the review, I bet you already knew it, but still) and he brings the same level of intensity Atomic Blonde. We see an absolutely brutal series of assaults on and by Lorraine. By the end of the fight, we feel the full weight of the effort expended by everyone in this tooth and nail struggle for survival. Lorraine and the dude she is fighting are exhausted, panting, struggling to will their muscles into action. It is great to see an action movie acknowledge just how much energy it takes to perform these acts. Everything about these fights feels real and grounded, even if some of the choreography is actually like crazy extreme.

Atomic Blonde is deeply connected to its Cold War milieu and to the spirit of the hard boiled detective and spy stories from that era, washed through a neon based style machine that owns stock in cigarette companies (hey, uh, pay attention to the cigarette brands). It feels familiar and fresh and vivid and personal. Theron is brilliant as the icy and distant operative who has savagely repressed herself in order to survive, but who still has a part of her that breathes and moves a different way when she senses the presence of someone who doesn’t belong to that milieu. We know that Sofia Boutella, the French operative, can kick ass, because she did it so memorably for Matthew Vaughan in Kingsman, but here she is vulnerable and way way way out of her depth here. James MacAvoy is brilliant as the chaotic but cunning David Percival, who sees the winds of change a blowing in Berlin and strives to ride it out when this list of secret agents gets into the wild. Atomic Blonde is built on personality and psychology as much as it is on spycraft, a trait it shares with the best psychological detective whodunits. The film invites us to understand every twist and turn as motivated by known actors we are allowed to understand. None of the twists are just out of the blue “OMG how,” they are all grounded in the tense moments the film lets us live, breathlessly, through. It’s a gorram spy masterpiece with some of the best action scenes on the planet, at least for this spy obsesses, Berlin loving, wannabe film critic, so choose the appropriately sized grains of salt. By all rights, you should have stopped reading this review ages ago and just gone and seen the damn movie. What the fuck are you waiting for?

Erin Teachman

Written by

Theatre. Sports. Econ. Cocktails. General geekery. The usual.

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