Civil War

A violent nightmare that I dreamed for some unknown reason. Kind of like Children of Men from Wish. Garland somewhat mechanically adorns his shady road movie with random images of a broken America. A number of them are impressive, with powerful visuals and staging (mainly the scene with Jesse Plemons). The film manages to induce anxiety to the point of nausea from a cruel world that is not so far from The Walking Dead in its absence of morality and prevalence of brutality. But…the whole thing seems terribly gratuitous; for all of the questions that the film wants to raise, Garland’s work just shrugs its shoulders and wagers on another spectacular composition. The characters are flat and the ethics and psychology of the war reporters come across as very superficial research. There is little in the way of Nietzschean gazing into the abyss in this film, which paradoxically comes across as terribly thesis-based and illustrative, but it isn’t at all clear what its thesis is or what it actually illustrates. An impressive exercise in unclearly straddling the line between a skilfully made spectacle and a not so skilfully rendered metaphor of a divided country. It’s actually a reiteration of my problem with Garland, a maker of spectacular movies that are dull at their core. (04/15/2024)

Olympic level in the discipline of "inducing a feeling of deep inner turmoil". I haven't seen something so often beautiful, yet repulsive and disturbing in a long time. And my apologies to A24 for wrongly suspecting it of producing a straightforward war blockbuster. It's, of course, another auteur film, just the way we like it. (04/24/2024)

Recall the three year old event when the Trump mob stormed the Capitol. Alex Garland sensitively and thoughtfully directs this theme, this societal schism, into disconnected mini-stories, with just these aforementioned protagonists (and they don't need a buffalo head to do it) killing because "real fucking America", all of which the protagonists, journalists, follow on their way to Washington. As long it stays in the road movie waters, with lots of iconic scenes, it's great. Unfortunately, Garland flips the switch at the end, and with the arrival in D.C., it becomes a regular war movie that felt like a mannerism in its denouement and showdown. Not only did it leave me cold at the end, but I actually thought "and that's it, Alex?". Too bad, we had the build-up to the movie event of the year, and well, it's not. But still an honest 4 stars (no stripes) for the impressive heaviness and disillusionment with humanity in the first two thirds. (04/19/2024)

This is an incredibly intense cinematic experience. Alex Garland is amazing, he can make things from sci-fi robots, to Annihilation, to the mind-fuck Men, to the post-apocalyptic Civil War, and I have to say that even such a "mundane" subject can bust your balls. The story focuses on a bunch of journalists on a trip to Washington with the desire to be the first to interview the President and reap the credit, and so we embark on a journey across America through several pitfalls. The biggest draw are the absolutely amazing visuals, which are colorful, beautiful to look at and realistic all at the same time, and I also have to point out the sort of detached nature of the whole film, which doesn't focus on all the characters that appear in the film, but rather just as one of many characters in that world, bringing to the fore not the actors and characters themselves, but rather the whole lot around them, so that the viewer can enjoy the story to the full and wonder "what on earth happened". I liked the variety of everything around, where we get a basic outline of the main characters and then we go straight into a journey where we are surprised by several situations, from a sniper, looting or a scene with soldiers, and once Jesse Plemons comes on the scene you better believe some hell is going to happen – here I have to admit that at this point I didn't breathe for five minutes, and after the whole situation was over I was internally anxious and nauseous like I haven't been in a really long time. There's an action packed finale filled with a fight in the city, so the film can cross that off the list too. But the biggest strength is the sound design, because it is absolutely flawlessly; the contrasts between utter silence, strange music and then the extremely loud gunshots make the film a complete assault on all the viewer's senses. For me, this is one of the best sounding films of our time and I will remember Civil War for this factor. Interestingly, then, all the shots were done with "real blanks", something not normally used in movies, instead of the much less sonorous blanks, which Garland rationalized by wanting to have the actors in action and at attention. Unreal. To be fair, I'd would love to see the serial form, as we don't really get a reason at all for why this is happening, how long it's been going on, and actually who's up against who, which would normally bother me a lot, but since this film completely captured my attention with everything around it, I didn't even feel the need to address that and just sat there, curled up in my seat, devouring this audio-visual masterpiece spiced up with a breathtaking finale and the scene with Plemons that nearly made my heart stop. AWESOME. (04/21/2024)

It was clear that Garland wasn’t going to make a blockbuster out of this. However, it wasn’t clear what his masterful balancing between reality and dimensions beyond human perception would bring to a film that is supposed to stand solely on raw realism. Civil War contains grand scenes with tanks and helicopters, but without a cinematographic concept of the kind that Alfonso Cuarón employed in Children of Men and which would be needed here. At its core, Civil War is merely an intimate road movie spanning a broken America as it follows a team of three seasoned journalists and their novice colleague, whose innocence stands in contrast to their experience and professional detachment. Our question of why such a young girl would be doing such work is immediately answered for us: “I’ve never been so scared in my entire life. And I've never felt more alive.” ___ Civil War avoids sentiment and the dark tone of the story is lightened by the use of American pop oldies, but it lacks the artistic optics that we like Garland for in the first place. The film should me made up entirely of terrifying scenes, but it contains only one, which reflects the one-dimensional thinking of America’s redneck population and features a standout performance by Jesse Plemons. The director amplifies the rawness not with dark instrumental music, but with the intense sound of gunfire. And even though the film is compelling and engaging thanks to its characters, it lacks refined and unexpected conflicts, as well as an intellectual reach that would go beyond warning us about Donald Trump. And the climax is literally ridiculous. (04/17/2024)