Atomic Blonde (2017) on Netflix
Days before the Berlin Wall falls, a KGB agent kills MI6 officer James Gascoigne and takes his watch, which holds a list of Berlin's agents. Lorraine Broughton is sent after it.
- Netflix3.3/5
- IMDb6.7/10222,201 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes79%
Trailer
Plot summary
In November 1989, days before the Berlin Wall comes down, KGB agent Yuri Bakhtin kills James Gascoigne, an MI6 officer in Berlin, and takes his wristwatch, which holds a microfilm list of the city's intelligence agents. Lorraine Broughton, a senior MI6 officer, is sent to the city to recover it, and is told to watch for Satchel, a double agent feeding the KGB. Two men sent to meet her are KGB agents, and she escapes after one names his boss, Aleksander Bremovych. Her own contact, station head David Percival, collects her. Searching Gascoigne's flat, she finds a photograph of him with Percival. A meeting with Bremovych in a restaurant is cut short by Delphine Lasalle, a novice French agent.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Atomic Blonde (2017)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Charlize Theron's preparation for the lead was brutal: she worked with eight personal trainers who "basically made [her] puke every single day", cracked her teeth from clenching her jaw and needed surgery to fix them, and bruised a rib.
- The stairwell sequence runs almost 10 minutes as one long take, and in the fight staged on those stairs Charlize Theron accidentally broke two of her teeth.
- It was originally hoped that David Bowie would play a part in Atomic Blonde, but he turned down the offer shortly before his death.
- Charlize Theron's training for the film overlapped with Keanu Reeves' training for John Wick: Chapter 2, and the two developed a competitive relationship that included sparring together.
- The film's bisexual subplot was not in the original book. It came from writer Kurt Johnstad, who suggested it after Theron was "thinking about how do you make this different from other spy movies".
- Most of the soundtrack's iconic songs come from the first half of the 1980s, the exception being George Michael's 1988 chart-topper "Father Figure", itself director David Leitch's second choice after Berlin's 1986 release "Take My Breath Away".
