Whatever you expect from an Alex Garland movie, he always\u00a0gives you something else.”Civil War” is something else again. It premiered in the US hours before I published this and it’s\u00a0already divisive. I look forward to reading all\u00a0of\u00a0the arguments for and against, even though both early\u00a0raves and pans seem to be operating under the reductive\u00a0assumption that it’s one of three things:\u00a0(1) an\u00a0alternative future history of a divided United States that’s intended as a cautionary tale; (2)\u00a0a technically proficient but empty-headed misery porn compendium that derives much of its power from images redolent of genocide and\/or lynching, but\u00a0ducks political specifics so as not to offend reactionaries; or\u00a0(3) a visionary spectacular with ultra-violence that might or might not have something important to say but will definitely look and sound great on an expensive home entertainment system.<\/p>\n
As it turns out, “Civil War”\u00a0is mainly something else: a thought experiment about journalistic ethics, set in a\u00a0future United States, yet\u00a0reminiscent of classic movies about Western\u00a0journalists covering the collapse of foreign countries, such as “The Year of Living Dangerously,” “Salvador,” “Under Fire,” and “Welcome to Sarajevo.”\u00a0<\/p>\n
How utterly bizarre, you might think. And in the abstract, it is bizarre. But “Civil War” is a\u00a0furiously convincing and disturbing thing\u00a0when you’re watching it. It’s a great movie that has its own life force. It’s not like anything Garland has made. It’s not like anything anyone has made, even though it contains echoes of dozens of other films (and novels) that appear to have fed the filmmaker’s imagination.<\/p>\n
Specifically, and most originally, “Civil War” is\u00a0a portrait of the mentality of pure reporters, the types of people who are less interested in explaining what things “mean” (in the manner of an editorial writer or “pundit”)\u00a0than in getting the scoop\u00a0before the competition, by any means necessary.\u00a0Whether\u00a0the scoop\u00a0takes the form of a written story, a TV\u00a0news segment, or a still photo that wins a Pulitzer, the quest for the scoop is\u00a0an end unto itself, and it’s bound up with\u00a0the massive dopamine hit that\u00a0that comes from putting oneself in harm’s way. The kinds of obsessive war correspondents who rarely come back to their own countries don’t care about the real-world impact of the political realities encoded within the epic violence they chronicle,\u00a0or else compartmentalize it to stay focused. \u00a0<\/p>\n
The\u00a0main characters of “Civil\u00a0War”\u00a0are four journalists. The film introduces them\u00a0covering a clash in New York\u00a0City\u00a0between what appear to be police forces from the official government and violent members of the opposition (we have to infer a lot because Garland drops you right into the deep end, as Haskell Wexler did in “Medium Cool,” about a news cameraman covering the 1968 protests in Chicago). Kirsten Dunst plays Lee, a legendary white female\u00a0photojournalist in the mold of her namesake Lee Miller. She’s\u00a0partnered with a South American-born\u00a0reporter named\u00a0Joel (Wagner Moura). Both work for Reuters news agency and\u00a0are fond of Sammy (veteran character actor\u00a0Stephen McKinley Henderson), an older African-American journalist who writes for \u201cwhat\u2019s left of the New York Times<\/em>,\u201d as Joel puts it; he walks slowly on a cane, definitely a liability when covering protests and battles.\u00a0<\/p>\n The group gains a fourth member, Jessie (Cailee Spaeny, the title character of “Priscilla”), a kind of junior version of Lee\u00a0who idolizes her.\u00a0Jessie charms the hard-drinking, on-the-prowl Joel and ends up joining the trio as they drive to\u00a0Washington,\u00a0D.C. in hopes of interviewing the president (Nick Offerman)\u00a0before he surrenders to the military forces\u00a0of something called the WA, or\u00a0Western Alliance. The WA\u00a0consists of militias from\u00a0California and Texas (with secondary support from Florida, which is apparently a different separatist group that shares the WA’s values).\u00a0<\/p>\n The first full-length trailer for “Civil War”\u00a0got picked apart as if it were the movie itself rather than an advertisement for it (a weird\u00a0regular occurrence in “film discourse,” such as it is). But the actual movie turns out to be\u00a0more politically astute and plausible than early reactions said, even though it’s likely that Garland’s “you already know the story” approach (like the way the overall arc of the\u00a0US occupation of Vietnam\u00a0was depicted in “Full Metal Jacket”) will seem to validate the gripes for the first hour.\u00a0Yes,\u00a0it’s true,\u00a0Texas votes Republican in national elections and California votes Democratic, but as of this writing,\u00a0Northern California is\u00a0increasingly controlled by libertarian-influenced tech billionaires, and\u00a0much of central and eastern California leans Republican and loathes California\u00a0Democrats so much that they’ve\u00a0advocated “divid(ing) parts of coastal California, including the Bay Area, from California to become an independent country.” The president is referred to as a fascist. I\u2019m not sure how literally we\u2019re supposed to take that because both Trump and Biden have been called that by people who don\u2019t like them.<\/p>\n But if you had to make a list of what “Civil War”\u00a0is trying to do,\u00a0“diagnosing what ails the United States of America”\u00a0might not crack the Top 5. Yes, if\u00a0you wanted to treat the movie so\u00a0reductively, you could.\u00a0But if you\u00a0pay attention to what the movie is actually doing rather than cherry picking elements that validate whatever take you brought in with you, it won’t be easy. I went into “Civil\u00a0War”\u00a0with arms folded, expecting to hate it, because so many contemporary\u00a0films about US politics by foreign filmmakers\u00a0seem to have cribbed their worldview\u00a0from New York Times editorials and bad\u00a0Tweets.\u00a0It upended my preconceived notions.<\/p>\n As far as “future shock” goes,\u00a0Garland, an Englishman,\u00a0isn’t cynically avoiding specifics or talking out of his behind. He’s burying\u00a0the text under subtext, in the name of creating a compelling but credible experience,\u00a0until said text explodes through the screen via Jesse Plemons, who has a cameo as a soldier who might or might not be a Western\u00a0Front officer but is surely a parasite on the remnants of the body politic. This soft-voiced, smirky hellion\u00a0interrogates\u00a0the terrified group of journalists\u00a0(which consists of two white women, a native-born Black man, and a\u00a0South American emigre, plus an\u00a0Asian-American and a Chinese immigrant\u00a0who joined them on the road) with all the delicacy of Gene Hackman’s racist white cop Popeye Doyle terrorizing Black people in “The French Connection” for kicks.<\/p>\n A terse line of dialogue reveals that\u00a0Lee became famous for taking a prize-winning photo of something called the “Antifa massacre” when Jessie was very young.\u00a0“Antifa massacre”\u00a0is initially tossed off in a way that makes you wonder if Garland is hoping progressives will assume it was anti-fascists\u00a0who were murdered by reactionaries, but reactionaries will assume it was\u00a0the reverse. Thanks to\u00a0Plemons’ demonic showstopper\u00a0and the thunderous, ultimately chilling\u00a0finale (set during the\u00a0attempted coup in Washington) I think it’s clear what happened. But your mileage will vary.<\/p>\n Nevertheless, these characters aren’t constantly exposition-ing\u00a0to each other and explaining the world to the viewer\u00a0because that’s not what people would\u00a0do in real life, whether they were trying to survive\u00a0mass extinction\u00a0in Gaza\u00a0or Ukraine or endure a\u00a0military dictatorship\u00a0in Argentina or Myanmar. Indeed, one\u00a0of the most\u00a0fascinating (or if you don’t like it, perplexing)\u00a0aspects of “Civil War” is\u00a0that it often plays\u00a0like an artifact warped into our world from\u00a0some future popular culture that has decided it’s finally\u00a0time for a “big statement” movie in the vein of\u00a0“Apocalypse Now” or “Full Metal Jacket,” but for people who remember an American Civil War and have enough perspective to consider buying a ticket to a blockbuster about it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Whatever you expect from an Alex Garland movie, he always\u00a0gives you something else.”Civil War” is something else again. It premiered in the US hours before I published this and it’s\u00a0already divisive. I look forward to reading all\u00a0of\u00a0the arguments for and against, even though both early\u00a0raves and pans seem to be operating under the reductive\u00a0assumption that …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[36,45,51],"class_list":["post-1155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-action-movies","tag-action","tag-drama","tag-science-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1155"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1155\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}