2024-04-24 13:19:00
America is falling apart. Civilized behavior goes by the wayside as soon as someone pulls out a bigger gun. Writer-director Alex Garland keeps his sci-fi vision down to earth as if it were the raw reality of the very near future. Civil War, which will be shown in Czech cinemas from Thursday, is his most skillful, roughest and most emotional film. Unfortunately, it’s also a picture of a creator who refuses to have an opinion on anything.
A quartet of journalists and war photographers embark on a mission to interview a president whose government has turned the country into a dystopian, violence-ridden landscape. Originally, it was just a photographer played by Kirsten Dunst and her colleague, played by Wagner Moura. In the end, however, an older colleague, who can practically no longer walk, convinces them to help him gain weight. And the group will be completed by an aspiring young photographer.
It’s already starting to get weird here, what exactly Alex Garland, the author of Ex Machina or Men, shot this time. Civil War uses an apocalyptic parable to talk about America today. At the same time, the creators refuse to depict any details of the world of the future. They throw their weakly characterized heroes into the middle of the action without making it clear to the audience why it should follow their mission. Soon begins an intense thriller ride through a landscape in which nothing but violence and more violence awaits the protagonists.
Garland isn’t afraid of explicit, shocking scenes that create an atmosphere of total doom. At the same time, it is not very understandable what exactly is the motivation of the characters to risk their lives to take pictures of the random rudeness they come across along the way.
It feels more like an unintended parody of the demanding work of war reporters. And it could easily be about selfish heroes who only care about their own success, but the film doesn’t suggest anything like that. Everything in Civil War is simply subordinated to getting the characters into adrenaline-pumping situations. And this dysfunctional movement between a suggestively filmed dystopian genre B-movie – but devoid of any humor – and an ambitious Garland parable endures until the end.
The journey from New York to Washington is disrupted mainly by petty skirmishes by a few individuals from the opposing sides, the nature of the conflict and its impact on the population is illustrated, for example, by a scene in which several armed men coldly load piles of dead bodies on the backs of trucks into mass graves. But they certainly don’t look like professionals tending to piles of corpses.
Only violence awaits the heroes of the film Civil War. Kirsten Dunst plays Lee. | Photo: Vertical Entertainment
Actor Jesse Plemons gets another chance to show that he is one of the scariest faces in Hollywood today. And it is precisely the clash with the group of thugs he commands that provides the film’s rawest, most hopeless moments.
Garland certainly got enough out of a meager budget. The scraps of plundered America and the remnants of civilization depicted are undeniably impressive. But the viewer must not make one mistake: start thinking. Which is quite strange for a writer, screenwriter and later director of works that use the genre of science fiction, thriller or horror for more ambitious purposes than suspense and entertainment.
Although the civil war still draws attention to how much the author wants to say that the world is very close to such a state. One of the heroes, for example, represents “what’s left of the New York Times”. But such vague yet vague allusions only underline how much Garland’s future America is just a sketchy vision, the most primitive attempt at a political allegory.
Civil War is more suggestive than Garland’s failed adaptation of the science fiction novel Annihilation. And compared to the film Ex Machina or the series Devs, the director is not so intoxicated with his own cleverness this time.
Both of these projects failed precisely because of the lifeless attempt to solve the well-known big themes of science fiction, whether it was the border between man and artificial intelligence, or the nature of free will.
This time, Garland made a more straightforward, more political sci-fi, in which the characters no longer have the space to encourage others to listen to Johann Sebastian Bach and John Coltrane, or to quote William Shakespeare.
But if the earlier ones rustled the paper, there are no characters in Civil War. Garland saves it with style and pace. But even the most hopeless horror scenes end with momentary impressiveness. Behind every audiovisual surprise is a question mark, what kind of heroes are we watching, why do they seem like a mere torso of journalists who just jump anywhere with their camera and risk the lives of themselves and others for some – very often relatively worthless – photo of some random skirmish.
Alex Garland made an impressive canapé. But it is still true that he is not able to really bewitch with his visions. As in his previous work, strong cinematic images fight with what remains in their background. And this time, the stronger the images, the emptier everything in the background.
Film
Civil War
Written and directed by Alex Garland
Vertical Entertainment, Czech premiere on April 18.