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)

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. (04/22/2024)

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. (04/25/2024)

A film that offers some impressive moments, but as a whole it mostly skims the surface. It deals with a few key themes, but it is mostly too thesis-like and one-dimensional. A raging America where we get no introduction and a miserable, rushed conclusion. Jesse Plemons steals for himself what is undoubtedly the film's best scene, and the final wartime inferno, while beautifully fluid and robust in sound, lacks technical skill and sophistication. It's not bad, Alex Garland is a capable and distinctive director, but Civil War is perhaps too ambitious a theme that deserved more than a journalistic road-movie with a wartime finale. (05/28/2024)

For Alex Garland, Civil War is a return to the tried-and-tested formula of a group of characters wandering through an "inhuman" landscape in pursuit of a vague goal, but compared to 28 Days Later, Annihilation and Sunshine, the British filmmaker is now dealing with a rather down-to-earth and quite realistic scenario. I've always seen him as a very capable genre filmmaker and I also got what I expected from his latest effort: a solid simple genre film; don't expect anything complicated or deep. The relative straightforwardness actually suits Garland far more than the artsy symbolism of his previous two efforts, which is also not to say that Civil War completely resigns itself to it. If I have one criticism, it's some all-too-obvious visual choices, in a film that, given the premise, would be best served by a straightforward and almost documentary-like approach, the director too often tries to frame the characters in all symmetry in the middle of the frame, as if they were in a Wes Anderson film, and it doesn't quite fit the concept. On the other hand, I appreciate that Garland didn't reach for some low-hanging fruit in the script and somehow politicised the film in a one-sided way at its core, so we get a story that is balanced and, most importantly, not black-and-white. (04/16/2024)