Civil War
First screened and reviewed in April 2024
Director: Alex Garland. Cast: Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura, Cailee Spaeny, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Nick Offerman, Nelson Lee, Evan Lai, Jesse Plemons, Jefferson White, Sonoya Mizuna, Karl Glusman, Jin Ha, Greg Hill. Screenplay: Alex Garland.VOR:④
I balked at both concept, culmination... well, you'll see below, but it's hard to deny this movie's strong nerve at a timid time for movies.
Basically all my Matrix feelings. I understand getting hooked on Civil War's audacity and its gutsy provocations, even if writing, characterizations, and theme are plenty glitchy even when the movie is at its strongest. And there are some strengths here. But the machinery really starts fritzing for me amid a sequence that's simultaneously among the movie's most tense and most spurious (Plemons / mass grave). The Charlottesville sequence suggests a real loss of bearings, and then, in line with my experience of The Matrix, the last act strikes me as morally, dramatically, and ideologically stomach-churning. Red meat for exactly the kind of society Civil War pretends to be urging us not to be. The most nauseating kind of first-person-shooter cinema. An amped-up, immersive, multi-sensory hyperbole of recent American events that any sensible person deplores, taken to even more obscene extremes than, thank heavens, they attained in life, with no thematic payoff that is fresh or smart enough to warrant such pornographic spectacle. By this point I hated the movie and the artistic sensibility of arrogant nihilism that it implies, and I personally wish Civil War didn't exist.
There are positive things to say on some technical grounds (sound especially, occasionally editing, very rarely cinematography), but that doesn't even matter much to me. Not while another generation gets its grandstanding cinematic invite to moral anarchy and orgiastic ballistics, dressed up as an intrepid X-ray of a rattled zeitgeist, all in principal service to the aggrandized self-perception of a "fearless"/reckless filmmaker. Grade:C
