Ares

Ares is a 2016 French dystopian science fiction film directed by Jean-Patrick Benes. Ola Rapace stars as a boxer who is forced into testing a dangerous new performance-enhancing drug for one of the corporations that now controls France. It premiered at the Paris Comic-con on October 21 and was released in France on 11 November 2016. Plot In the 2020s, France's economy collapses, and corporations buy its debt. More than 15% of the population is unemployed and living in squalid homeless encampments-the largest being under the Eiffel Tower. Although still nominally a republic, the corporations take control of the government and pass sweeping reforms, deregulating many industries. Among these changes, doping and human experimentation are legalized. As homelessness and unemployment rise, violent new sports are introduced. Athletes become sponsored by pharmaceutical companies, who test their new drugs on them. After a promising start, boxer Reda, who fights under the pseudonym Ares, is injured and loses his corporate sponsor. Besides performing in brutal cage matches as a low-ranked fighter, he takes jobs for a female corporate agent Altman, with whom he has a relationship. The corporate-run police department hire unemployed temporary workers during periods of civil unrest, with Reda being one of riot security guards on the front lines. During a riot, he notices his niece(an advocate of anti-corporatism) getting placed in a police van and he manages to get her released. When his sister Carla is framed for possession of an illegal pistol, Altman tells Reda that Carla will be charged as a terrorist. The only way to save her from a prison sentence is to bribe the officials, which will take €100,000. To raise the money, Reda is forced to submit to human experimentation for HSX, a drug that has killed every other test subject. Although corporate executive Anna assures him his biochemistry will likely allow him to survive the drug, she warns that he will black out five minutes after taking it. Reda leaves Carla's children with his neighbor, a cross-dressing prostitute named Myosotis who believes Reda to be a fascist. Despite their antagonistic relationship, Myosotis agrees to help him for the sake of the children.