7. Civil War, dir. Alex Garland
Remember when 2024 happened and we were all terrified what would happen during the election? Did we get off lucky since the bad guys won the popular vote, thus eliminating the need for a violent bloodbath? At least, we deferred that violence until those people are in office. It can all seem nice and normal this way.
Alex Garland's Civil War does not have politics, not on that level. It does not fall into any explicit "pro or anti Trump" binary. Civil War is not offering some bill that a party must sign. The very concept of this film makes no sense according to our politics: California and Texas are somehow unified? This is a movie more about vibes, a sense of increasing hatred. There is a villainous character asking our heroes "what kind of American are you?" There is a right and a wrong answer here. The immigrants in the party suffer the most, but that is about it in terms of any messaging.
Civil War is not about any particular alt-history or science fiction concept of a particular Civil War. It is a kind of ur-Civil War, the pure elements of this process and its complete destruction and terror. Garland is taking the imagery of modern global conflict and bringing it "home" - well, to my home. I'm American, he's an Englishman. The concept of this movie is that horrors you see on the news in Ukraine or Syria or Palestine or Sudan, will now happen in in the suburbs, by chain hotels, in mall parking lots, and finally on the White House lawn. This is society torn apart to its most chaotic, awful impulses, so that gas station attendants happily pose by the strung-up corpses of their neighbors for press photos. The colors on the map move with the various victories or defeats. But Civil War takes place mostly on the peripheries where, nobody is in control.
Another interesting aspect is the focus on battlefield reporters of all things. Civil War feels odd to frame itself here considering the rapid decline of the modern media ecosystem. Even the Washington Post is trying a desperate right-wing rebrand before its billionaire master gets bored and shuts it down. However, there must be somebody out there to tell the story. Somebody must take the pictures. So we find ourselves following an odd party of veteran battlefield corespondents (Wagner Moura, Stephen McKinley Henderson), photographers (Kirsten Dunst) and an innocent young wanna-be along for the ride (Cailee Spaeny). They're having road trip cross-country to race against the collapse of the federal government to get one final blurb from President Nick Offerman. The journey is about increasing dissociation. A typical war film will teach its green soldier how to kill, Civil War teaches its young reporter to shoot her camera as the bullets fly. She gets more and more reckless with her life, more willing to get that final perfect shot to capture... something.
Our protagonist march through exciting set piece after set piece, through greasy landscapes of neon hair dyes and colorful graffiti (it's a Gamer aesthetic apocalypse, perfect for 2024). Garland makes one of the great blockbusters of 2024, in terms of raw excitement. He is as masterful here in building tension and the sense of increasing darkness and un-reality as he was in Annihilation. You can feel the inevitable switch towards a darker tone during a fun ride out in the woods, even while everybody is having fun, your heart is pounding, because you know this is un-safe. Something bad is hiding out where you cannot see it. The final sequence is an FPS assault on the final boss, with bullets flying in every direction.
And yet, we leave with a sense that maybe none of this was worth it. The blurb from President Offerman is one word. The shots of his corpse are disturbing. Yet what truth really was uncovered? All this journalism was as a death-seeking profession as any other on the front lines. Our protagonists never kill anybody, but they come off as voyeurs or parasites.
There was talk this year that Alex Garland was ready to quit filmmaking. That seems less likely since he has an Iraq War movie ready to release in 2025, and after that he's making a sequel to 28 Years Later in 2026. I've loved many of Garland's movies, especially Annihilation, so I would miss him. I am glad he changed his mind. However, you can see Garland's ambivalence at the entire process in Civil War. His photographer heroes, are tirelessly risking everything for their craft, and we end with this emptiness. Filmmaking and photography are the same artform in many ways. So what are we left with after all the tight staging of gun fights and months of choreography? There's this big sense of nothing. We get no final great message from President Offerman, our reporters do nothing to save America, the film gives us nothing to stop its vision of an apocalypse. We just have more imagery to digest.
The Civil War's over, kids, time to go home.
No comments:
Post a Comment