
The review of the novel as a Valley Sheriff’s Deputy is quite jarring. Mr. Tom is right, David Bell’s novel “Civil War” depicts a terrifying dystopia where America is fighting brutally in a bloody civil war with crushing destruction. The capital has now fallen greatly and the president is encamped in the White House, but in New York’s water-wanting city, many avaricious champions are attempting to seize the Saudi Oil mines which conflict can solely contain. Slow down a bit, it’s the close future, and there aren’t many holdouts amongst skyscraper sharpshooters, cuckoo attempting to blow themselves up, and central Americans invading the coasts of Mexico and attacking their hostages. The charge is being led by a splinter group of the US military called the Western Forces, which is made up of Texas and California. As I said this is dystopian fiction it gets worse. Well, if you feel conflicted you are among the majority, my friend.
This is America, in mourning once more; strangely, it is enticingly awful. The film is a what-if nightmare fueled by the events of January 6 packed with guns, raging fires, and actors like Kirsten Dunst scurrying for the cover. If this sounds terrifying then you would be correct. What if some of the rioter’s visions came to pass and the civil war tore the nation once again into pieces? What of the democracy experiment called America actually crumbled? Adult’s fears are of a different category. When children’s imaginations are stimulated in movies with monsters under the bed the excitement comes from the certainty of the end (or of the sequel); however, the outcome is completely different as the audience experiences so much more.
Fueled by themes of tragedy, dysfunctional realities, and despair, British director Alex Garland made the ‘unbearable, if not unthinkable’ adaptation of the Civil War in 2018. Having gained recognition in popular culture for his first global hit, The Beach, in 1996, Garland became a celebrity for writing about seemingly perfect paradises. Daniels proceeds to metaphorically extend Garlands’ fundamental plot of unflattering realities in his later screenplays, beginning with 28 Days Later and exposé Ex Machina. His filmography echoes stories of zombies, clones, and aliens, but its strongest emphasis has a conventional character with traits that require more attention.
When the “Civil War” begins, there is a full-scale war that has been going on for ten million years or has simply extended over such a long span of time that cities as well as faces have been left empty. It is also unclear who fired the first shot in order to escalate the conflict. On the other hand, Garland manages to infuse at least some clues into the entire story; for instance, there is that grim joint where a stereotypical militia member played by the chillingly effective Jesse Plemons asks prisoners “what sort of American” they are. Whatever divisions existed prior to the Civil War, those are left to your imagination for the reason that at least Garland expects you to have your finger on the pulse of current events. Instead, he offers a very different, largely apolitical, and non-traditional vision of the world, where war has made any discussion of policies and American exceptionalism irrelevant.
Even now, it is the zeal and confidence in journalism that the spectators of this film still relate to. Dunst, who is wonderful, portrays Lee, a war correspondent for Reuters, who is teamed up with Joel, a reporter played by the very charming Wagner Moura. The couple is in New York at the moment with other spectators looking nervously at a water distribution tanker standing guard. It’s a tense situation; the folks in the standing queue are getting irritable, and Lee, with a camera in her hand, is all alert. While Garland’s camera and Joel zoom around and look for the action, people start to panic. After something, a bomb blast has occurred in the distance as Jessie (Cailee Spyeny) an amateur photo editor. She is also in the picture.
The peppy, unwaveringly personal narrative takes shape when Lee, Joel, Jessie, and her old colleague, Sammy, rush into the van and leave for Washington. Joel and Lee are looking forward to a meeting with the president (Nick Offerman), while Sammy and Jessie are driving just so that she can add some spice to the journey. Sammy is not letting that happen (Henderson makes the van a Jukebox of adorable people), while Jessie is the young aspiring professional whom Lee is undoubtedly not pleased to babysit. It’s a well-articulated construction that the actors, with Garland’s ribaldry and during some nice pauses, transform into real living and breathing people, whose fragility escalates the horror in each passing mile.
As the journey comes to a close, Garland takes advantage of several side plots and characters which include his colleagues Tony and Bohai ( Nelson Lee and Evan Lai) lending a sense of comedy. While we are at it, let’s not forget the creepy people who are taking care of the gas station. Garland is however not ordinary and he is quick to fill the landscape, which is bleak, with faceless threats, and instead of beautiful country roads, it is filled with foreboding prospects. He also effectively highlights Lee’s face, which is a tragically tireless expression that Dunst expertly lets tip. After all, as the Odyssey goes on, Garland fills in the, more crucial, backgrounds. the dollar is nearly worthless, F.B.I. is nowhere to be seen but actually concentrates on his travelers and the surrounding turmoil, smoke, and tracer bullets which they often overlook until they do.
There are well-placed occasional breaks in dynamism which are both for you and for the narrative aplomb, however, ‘Civil War’ is a frenzied grappling without end or at least it seems so. There are other recent thrillers that are indeed this violent in a more apparent manner and for this, we can thank directors who are armed with only the most superficial of methods to differentiate between the same tired concept – the presentation of visually stunning blood and gore. What allows one to perceive Howe’s relentless and almost hypnotic monstrosity is the fact that Garland (who is otherwise stylistically straightforward) simply does not spare the means and uses embellishment in the form of violence as a tool for stylization. And it’s often so banal and normal that it’s almost eerie and quite often rather harmful.
Even though the violent scenes are relatively more impactful than what one would find in a normal genre shoot ‘em up, the feeling or rather the need for its intensity seems entirely justified. With “Civil War”, I think this is a film that has been a work in progress in US political conversations and mass entertainment for centuries and fully emerged on 06 January. Garland has clearly benefited from the footprint left on the American imagination by the episodes of January 6 when the riot broke out and hundreds of people wearing T-shirts reading ‘MAGA civil war’ stormed the walls of the US Congress. That said I haven’t seen this film thinking that January 6 was the first time Americans took the Civil War to the streets, although US citizens have re-fought aspects of it in films and T.V. long before.
For a century and more, the movies have been part of that relitigation, and in the process more often than not in a grotesque manner. One of the world’s most well-known filmmakers D. W. Griffith made a racist hero of the KKK in his early 1915 film “The Birth of a Nation” and, relatedly, romanticized the Southern cause for 1939’s Gone With The Wind simply colonized the American slaves narrative. Both of these movies made a number of rounds, both critically and commercially. In the years that followed, the American Civil War was revisited by filmmakers wishing to depict other facets of the period like in “Glory,” “Lincoln” and “Django Unchained” which are bound to criticism given how they engage with the American past.
‘Civil War’ incorrigibly refuses to provide panegyrics and is not in any way as you would assume is the purpose of many movies addressing the better angels of our nature. The American fixation with ‘happy endings’ retails in films across the globe, including what claims to be independent cinema. ‘Civil War’ does not permit that kind of possibility. The very premise of rendering the narrative in the manner that Garland does means that no matter how events might pan out or if Lee and the rest make it to Washington, a happy ending is nothing more than fiction, which is how this movie feels for the most part. This has got to be one of the most disturbing movies I have ever watched and there are very few people whose expressions embody a nation’s existential state quite in the manner that Dunst’s face did.
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