Post by Dracula on Apr 13, 2024 7:40:42 GMT -5
Civil War(4/8/2024)
When the combat does pop off in this movie it is pretty effective and tense. The violence here is brutal and a bit disturbing, but certainly still a spectacle, and the film’s soundtrack features a lot of notably very loud gunshot sound effects. I will say, for a movie that’s trying very hard to scream modernity there is something a bit old fashioned about its conception of modern combat. We’re given little indication here that drone strikes exist in the world of the movie and there’s a level of small arms fire that seems a bit out of step with where most contemporary battles are going, but maybe that’s for the best cinematically. That spectacle mixed with the novelty of seeing this kind of material is the main reason to see this movie and it’s definitely a good enough reason. I do not know that this is something I can really take all that seriously however; on some level I think this is more of a glorified zombie movie than it is a real cautionary tale about political divisions run amok. But is that isn’t an inherently bad thing, I like zombie movies and finding a new spin on society falling apart in a disastrous conflict is a smart thing to do.
***1/2 out of Five
A24 has been successful for a lot of reasons but among the biggest keys to their success is their ability to generate conversation, and they sure generated a lot of conversation when the trailer to the Alex Garland directed thriller Civil War dropped. Part of that conversation had to do with the film’s place within the A24 business model: this was clearly much more expensive than most of the movies they put out and would be seeking to be a much bigger mainstream hit. But the bigger conversation had more to do with the movie itself and what it was doing. It’s no secret that the United States is presently being ripped apart by partisanship and cultural warfare and that there’s a specter of dictatorship on the horizon if a certain someone finds his way back into office. With that as a backdrop any movie about the country being torn apart by actual literal warfare is going to be pretty loaded. There were plenty of debates about how the alliance the film posits between Texas and California against a seemingly dictatorial president would even work or how such a realignment would happen given the existing political cleavages in the country and also how such a war would even function but the bigger question was what exactly the movie was even trying to say by positing such a conflict. Personally, I had some pretty strong reservations but I was more than intrigued enough to give it a shot, especially given that it was coming from an interesting voice like that of Alex Garland.
The film is set in some sort of alternate timeline of the present day or near future and posits a world in which the United States has been in a state of civil war for a while when the film begins. The nation has been divided into the “Loyalist States,” the “Western Forces” lead by California and Texas and also something called the “Florida Alliance.” The exact makeup and ideologies of these forces are left vague but we know they are in opposition to a seemingly dictatorial unnamed President played by Nick Offerman who’s said to be in his third term or later in office. We follow this from the perspective of Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst), a war photographer who we’re introduced to as she photographs a protest that turns violent on the streets of New York. During that scuffle she meets Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), a women in her early twenties who also has a passion for news photography and idolizes Smith. The war is apparently in its late stages with the Western Forces primed to move in on D.C., prompting Smith and a colleague named Joel (Wagner Moura) to drive down to that city to get a final interview with the president and both Jessie and another veteran journalist named Sammy (Stephen Henderson) decide to tag along.
As I mentioned before, I think the basic alternate universe premise behind this movie just does not make a whole lot of sense. Releasing such a movie during this particular moment of polarization and in an election year no less instantly makes you assume it’s trying to act as some sort of cautionary tale about where current conflicts could be heading but the movie never quite “goes there.” We don’t get a clear idea what political ideology the film’s unnamed fictional president belongs to beyond his having some dictatorial tendencies and the states that are said to be on his side and opposed to him do not really seem to follow modern partisan lines and that alliance between California and Texas seems particularly eyebrow raising. In some ways this might have made a bit more sense if they’d dropped the whole “war between the states” terminology and just made this some non-geographically aligned “rebel alliance” against the regime in power, though one also wonders how such a group could get a regular army with advanced armaments and a seemingly conventional hierarchy of power.
It’s not entirely clear from the outset which side we should be rooting for through all this, which is probably partly by design. It’s not always entirely clear what side the various soldiers we encounter are fighting for as many are not in uniforms and the ones who are wear fairly interchangeable camouflage fatigues and it’s also not entirely clear what the “Florida Alliance” is in all of this and both sides do some questionable things throughout. As a viewer of a certain political outlook I’m generally inclined to view the idea of a violent rebellion in this country with a lot of suspicion given who were the “rebels” in the actual 19th Century Civil War and also because the people in modern America most inclined toward anti-government militarism (paranoid right wing “militias”). I do not get the impression from watching the movie that this particular rebellion is rooted in paranoia as this president does appear to be legitimately totalitarian but the movie does withhold a lot of the information you might want in order to really pick sides. In some ways this mirrors the complexity of a lot of civil wars in the real modern world line in Syria, where Bashar al-Assad legitimately seems like a butcher who deserves to be taken down, but where there also seemed to be extremists among the resistance who may well be even worse than the people they’re bringing down if they prove to be the ones taking power when all is said and done.
Of course I suspect that if asked Alex Garland would tell me that getting this into the weeds about the sides in this Civil War is a mistake and that the real focus here is on the visceral feeling of what the sight of such a conflict happening in modern America would invoke. In a lot of ways the Alex Garland project this most closely resembles are the 28 Days Later in that this sort of a post-apocalypse movie even if the apocalypse is locally contained. In fact the interplay between the Dunst and Spaeny characters as they take a road trip across this war torn landscape is not too far from the whole Children of Men/The Road/Logan/“The Last of Us” formula that pop culture has been using pretty regularly lately. That’s not a criticism per se, this is a clever enough riff on the idea, but it’s definitely there. The arcs of these various characters in the group are not too hard to predict but the actors flesh them out well enough and their journey works well enough for its intended purpose of showing off different aspects of the film’s world without giving us too much of a bird’s eye view of things.
***1/2 out of Five
