'Civil War' briefing

3 (out of 4)

            If any movie this year was gonna end up either shit or something else, it was Alex Garland’s Civil War, another troubling, transgressive ticket to the show for science fiction’s former friend, not a man for whom allegory has served well so far, and you’re swapping gender for today’s political climate of division? Godspeed Alex and God Bless America I guess (you dirty redcoat), but it beckons asking: “Back to the drawing board are we?” Let’s see, why could you need to return to basics, oh yeah maybe it was because Men was folk horror that was mostly just folked in the head, a symbol-saddled psychological thriller of mostly incomprehensible, unpleasant feminism for masochists. It was bound to split critics and audiences for its potently agonizing, confusing choices that need quite the defense of artistic freedom to have been made in the first place.

Now that he’s dealing with a subject and situation that might have to result in some real ideological fallout for his creative decisions and, despite returning to near-future worlds with imminent crises to resolve (including the screenplays for Danny Boyle, that entails zombie apocalypse, a dying sun, attractive AI gone amok and swelling alien territory), still there’s a naggingly hazy notion as to what exactly Alex was trying to say here. Would he rather not get into election year conversations? To be fair April is juuuuust outside the realm where it would seem like some actual mainstream political moment like uh, Swing Vote? Purge: Election Year? Honestly I have no idea…. Back in the 90s there was a regular rotation of conspiracy thrillers echoing from the eras of JFK’s assassination, Watergate or the later days of the Cold War.

So Civil War is a political film with few political notions, from a “message” perspective too cowardly even to completely hide behind Drumpf and the mass media’s proclivity for left-leaning thought. I imagine the film would make both sides mad for not going hard enough on any kind of insight — the world-of-tomorrow promises of science fiction still invoke his steady genre’s prescription for implication and finding some far-sighted truths from our present. Some may find Nick Offerman’s brief, pursed-lipped introduction to be indicative of Trump’s demeanor, or none at all. The orientation doesn’t exactly matter given the intimate scope of the movie, as is usually Garland’s liking — with six primary characters, Annihilation is probably as expansive an ensemble as we’ll ever see from him.

Though just as entertainment — even if it’s quite difficult to see it as such — Civil War is a hearty, lucid movie, a return to form, an irresistible Heart of Darkness for the homeland building to a memorable, thrilling finale. A24’s highest budgeted fare almost doesn’t feel or look like it, and the man emblematic of the studio’s signature minimalism (Robert Eggers and others fall into a caveat, there are only so many hipster auteurs to emerge from their indie film renaissance) finds himself toying with dangerous ideas, and either the stubbornness or the frugality to exhibit his latest as merely moviemaking and nothing more. Sorry but I find more to enjoy and extrapolate from the manipulative interplay at the infancy of human-cyborg relations in Ex Machina, as well as the haunting hallucinatory excuse to contemplate first contact in Annihilation.

Civil War does bear questions of conscience, or admits that journalism has no place for conscience — for a movie all about photography and crumbling empires, the near-future decay is convincing and Garland’s eye, sunken in steep, unshakable shallow focus (courtesy of longtime collaborating cinematographer Rob Hardy), can’t help but make the most of the perilous beauty and anarchic dissent of an imprecise American future portioned by what looks like possibly politically nonsensical lines in the sand. Civil War has commentary on inflation, mid-war morality and how hard it is to be blindly objective (both in film and in political coverage), plus the characters are memorable and acted with admirable, all-too-precise naturalism, particularly Kirsten Dunst’s haunted anchor.

I couldn’t even recognize Cailee Spaeny — just like her breakout part in Priscilla, this girl’s entire visage is an agreeable, midcentury sort of template, the ideal everywoman. She shares the leading spot with Dunst (both Sofia Coppola veterans) who offers plenty of hardened caginess as the jaded war photojournalist begrudgingly escorting new blood through dangerous terrain. Wagner Moura, who is definitely not Pedro Pascal, might end up the more popular Spanish guy, and Stephen McKinley Henderson is like the new Morgan Freeman or something (not the token black guy I swear!), a remarkable supporting player for any situation from Manchester by the Sea to Dune to Beau is Afraid.

Garland is apparently stepping away from directing for awhile to get back to screenplays — maybe avoid Danny Boyle as steward (Cillian Murphy is obviously okay in my book) and Garland could end up an even more productive Hollywood hack than however trapped he feels behind the camera. Civil War has the makings of one of 2024’s most interesting moments, if ONLY (if ANYTHING) the themes illustrated any kind of stance at all, and I’m a CENTRIST for fuck’s sake: as Dylan said “fearing not I become my enemy in the instant that I preach.” I still feel like for all your gifts and graces, you made the ultimate choice say oh well — such a casual, unexplained drop of the future-history event known as the ”ANTIFA MASSACRE” sums up this bloody Brit’s prodding (almost Anti-American) indifference rather well. See what you wanna see, hey maybe I will take a picture of your dead body for posterity… “What do you think?” is the thesis but I could ask you the same thing Alex.

The ironic soundtrack choices — like executing prisoners of war to De La Soul — doesn’t really speak to neutrality or something nonpartisan, in fact these moments find the movie at its most detached. The flippant foil these juxtapositions elicit range from meaningful to moronic, weird for a movie that maybe fruitlessly is “trying to send a message home, some warning” or whatever. Civil War evenly balances the chaos and the quiet, especially with two almost nonsensically placed Suicide tracks. Maybe in the end it’s predominantly a cogent, clearheaded, dispassionate, disturbing thriller about how truly fucked our country is and how little idea we have of how bad it could get no matter how you vote. The built-in bothsidesism is cavalier and even obtuse, nonetheless Civil War is a near-excellent exercise in cursory poke-the-bear cinema, emitting a good deal of cult classic potential for those who will eventually use this as another object of explanation for what the last decade of politics has done to the collective psyche.