Ares 2016

In a near-future France, the economy has collapsed and corporate power eclipses the old republic. Banks and mega-companies buy up national debt, leaving more than 15% of the population unemployed and sheltering in squalid encampments, the largest sprawling under the Eiffel Tower. In this world, the government is nominally a republic, but the corporations run everything, passing sweeping reforms that deregulate industries and bend the rule of law to their advantage. Among these changes, doping and human experimentation become legalized, and violent new spectator sports emerge as big sponsors push pharmaceutical drugs on athletes. Reda, Vincent Deniard fights under the nickname Arès, earning a living in brutal cage matches while being sponsored by powerful corporate interests.

Reda’s life is tangled with Altman, a female corporate agent who exercises leverage over him, and with a corrupt system that trades in human risk for profit. As the state’s riot police are replaced by unemployed temporary workers serviceable to the corporations, Reda finds himself on the front lines during civil unrest, acting as part of the security apparatus but also as someone who cares for those around him. During one riot, his niece—a vocal anti-corporate advocate—gets swept into a police van, and Reda manages to secure her release, a moment that underscores the personal stakes behind the political theater.

Carla, Reda’s sister, is framed for possession of a pistol and branded a terrorist. Altman delivers the grim news: Carla will stand trial, unless Reda can find a €100,000 bribe to secure her release. The only feasible route is consent to participate in HSX, a drug trial whose track record is catastrophic. Reda is told that the drug could maximize his biochemistry enough to survive, but it will trigger a five-minute blackout that could erase the memory of what follows. To safeguard Carla’s children, Reda leaves them with Myosotis, a neighbor who supports them and who—despite a rocky history with Reda—agrees to help him for the kids’ sake. Myosotis, Micha Lescot, is a complex ally: protective yet wary of Reda’s judgments, and their shared concern for the children drives the action forward.

The boardroom push to sell HSX pushes Reda toward a dramatic test. To demonstrate the drug’s power and generate sales, the CEO arranges for Reda to fight a top-tier fighter whose nervous system has been enhanced to feel no pain. The match is viewed as a near-impossible challenge, and even Reda’s coach—who doubts him—won’t place bets on a victory. Yet HSX performs as advertised, and Reda secures a stunning win against odds of twelve to one. The victory sends HSX into the mainstream, and with the money Reda ascends to freedom for Carla, using Myosotis as the broker. But tragedy strikes when Carla dies in prison while trying to defend another inmate, revealing the human cost at the heart of corporate experiments.

Anna, Ruth Vega Fernandez, a security figure within the corporation, tries to salvage their project and frames a different narrative around Reda’s motives. She informs Reda that Altman can be persuaded to return his funds if he helps with the broader scheme—yet Reda asks that the money instead be used to uncover who framed Carla. The resistance is further energized when Anouk, Éva Lallier, Anouk’s boyfriend Boris—a hacker who supports anti-corporate actions—provides critical evidence that implicates Reda’s coach in some of the machinations.

With Carla’s children in peril, Reda again has to rely on Myosotis and Boris to keep him in their orbit. Reda’s next fight ends in a brutal 17-second defeat, crushing public confidence that HSX is a reliable path to wealth for the lower ranks. The corporate machine quietly writes off the earlier victory as a fluke, and Reda’s coach is financially ruined as a consequence. When Reda confronts his own choices, he reveals that he did not take HSX and instead threw the fight to preserve the drug for a more consequential use. He saves the drug for his coach, who dies quickly after being injected, a moment that intensifies the moral calculus of every player in the drama.

Anna confronts Reda with the chilling reality that Altman intends to kidnap Carla’s children, arguing that Altman’s loyalty to money eclipses any personal care. Reda agrees to stage a dramatic demonstration for the corporate board, hoping to expose the truth. At home, Altman orders Anouk to phone Myosotis, insinuating a gesture of gratitude from Reda that Myosotis finds suspicious. Myosotis recruits Boris’s hacking talents to uncover what’s really going on, recognizing that a misdirection has been laid out for them all.

In a climactic rescue, Boris and Myosotis save the children and kill Altman, a brutal end to one strand of corporate influence. Reda’s bodyguards—a pair of genetically engineered arena-fighter clones— initially gain an advantage but are ordered to spare Reda; the board’s calculus about killing him collapses. As the five-minute window of the HSX drug nears expiration, Reda contemplates eliminating Anna, but instead helps Boris remotely hack the corporation’s mainframe. The breakthrough reveals shocking numbers: more than 30,000 people died in HSX drug trials, a catastrophe that dwarfs the personal losses already suffered.

Knowing that his nieces will remain unsafe as long as he is alive as “patient zero,” Reda makes the ultimate sacrifice and takes his own life. Anna protests, and the corporation attempts to bury the scandal, but Boris hijacks the advertising and media displays to broadcast the truth, exposing the full extent of HSX’s failed trials and Reda’s death. The revelation becomes a catalyst for a mass movement against the corporate leadership, triggering widespread riots and a new energy behind the resistance—the moment when the fight against corporate domination begins to reshape France.