I’ll be blunt. I didn’t think much of Civil War going into it. I think the hoopla and hype surrounding the movie was A24’s attempt to get butts in seats after reportedly spending $50 million, their most ever on a movie production.
But from the start, it looked about the same as just about every other dystopia/apocalypse action thriller that has been made since the 1970s. First off, the biggest problem is that Alex Garland’s attempt to not take a political stance on the movie actually hurts the movie’s overall tone.
Nick Offerman plays the President of the United States delivering a speech about how the Florida forces were unsuccessful getting the Carolinas to join them. The Western Forces consist of people from California and Texas as they push east toward Washington, D.C. In New York City, a seasoned war photographer, Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst), helps a young aspiring photographer, Jessie Collins (Caliee Spaeny), survive a suicide bombing
Later she tags along with Lee and Joel (Wagner Moura), who is supposed to be a reporter with Reuters but mostly acts like a dudebro during Spring Break. Then, there is the aging veteran journalist, Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), who is Lee’s mentor. But despite all four of them together, there’s never a line a dialogue dropped about what happened much. Sammy says something about the President in the third term and something about disbanding the FBI. He also mentions the President has made the press “enemy combatants.”
I guess we’re supposed to accept this movie because it’s from the mind of Alex Garland, who was born and raised in England. Garland also wrote 28 Days Later, which helped rejuvenate the zombie subgenre, even though it was actually a rage virus. While I didn’t really care for that movie as much, I could understand what he and director Danny Boyle were trying to do. Also the imagery of a desolate London looked more eerie than the imagery of buildings and landscapes that are really the northern half of Georgia but are supposed to be a generic overall of upper Appalachia.
Because we never do have a clear understanding of what’s happening, we’re never able to comprehend what is at stake. The four journalists meet the typical country bumpkins with their carbine AR-15 rifles and tactical gear. An interaction implies the American dollar is useless but the Canadian dollar is more important.
Jesse Plemons, Dunst’s husband, pops up in a scene as a pro-American guy with his rifle. I just don’t find Plemons scary at all. I never did watch Breaking Bad. To be, he just looks like he could Matt Damon’s goofy younger brother. There’s one sequence in which they observe what we presume is a secessionist force taking on the U.S. military (from an elevated position nonetheless). But again, we don’t know what is going on.
Worse, Garland thinks he’s being daring by showing the forces shooting wounded and unarmed military. And during one scene that should be brutal but comes off as poorly executed (pardon the pun), De La Soul plays on the soundtrack as a gunman laughs wildly using an M-60 on three military POWs. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I get it. Garland is trying to say it’s hard to tell who the good guys are and who the bad guys are. I’m pretty sure every other filmmaker who has made a movie about war felt they were being provocative and innovative doing the goddamned exact same thing.
But Garland isn’t doing anything different that other filmmakers have done in the past. During the 1980s, movies like Red Dawn and Invasion U.S.A. presented alternative realities where forces from other countries invaded America. They were really nothing more than typical pro-America Reaganeighties drivel, but at least we knew what side people were on. I felt Garland was trying to go more for the feel of Children of Men. But there’s no powerful scene that Aflonso Cuaron did where both sides stop firing to let a woman who just gave birth pass before they foolishly go back to killing each other.
Yet, this movie has already been made before and also in the 1980s. We saw movies like The Killing Fields, Under Fire and Salvador all tell stories of journalists caught up in civil wars and conflicts. Garland isn’t really touching on any new ground here. Let’s not forget, we’ve have six Dead movies directed by George A. Romero, about two dozen seasons of The Walking Dead and their spin-offs, five Mad Max movies and five movies of The Purge franchise with a sixth one reportedly in development.
We’ve seen all the countless footage of people turning against each other for no other reason than people fighting over a box of Corn Flakes. This is just another variation of Richard Connell’s short story “The Most Dangerous Game.” Even worse, the movie is so predictable. When you meet every main character, you know immediately what is going to happen to them because they fit every cliche. In 1997, HBO aired a TV movie The Second Civil War, directed by Joe Dante intended as a satirical black comedy. It had a run time just a little under this one at 98 minutes with credits and it still managed to tell a complete story with a background.
The more interesting story is how Texas and California, two states so different on political spectrum, were able to mobilize together. The $64,000 question Garland never answers is where are all the other law enforcement agencies and military troops. The movie leaves a lot of questions unanswered and we know so little of the main characters we never do care if they are in trouble. I felt Dunst was wrongly miscast. She can act and play good characters. But I never believed her as a war photographer. Spaeny, on the other hand, was too believe as a gullible journalist.
Also calling this movie Civil War is a shameless way to get people more into it.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 