Civil War (2024, Garland)
Major spoiler at the end of this, FWIW.
Moronic, phony Call of Duty knockoff suffused with neoliberal guilt. Insofar as it is successful at anything, it is as a corny allegory for the insufficiency of media to capture the zeitgeist or to animate positive action. Which, okay, are we making 50 million dollar movies about how movies are meaningless now? Self-aggrandizement disguised as self-immolation? If you’re gonna make a hit job on Hollywood, don’t disguise it by badly pillaging American iconography.
I’d say this is what you get when you give a Brit the reins, and certainly thought it throughout the film. But there’s more to the story, I think: a story absent of the fanaticism and blasphemy that would make this a truly American story. It’s the increasing hegemony of the powers that be at A24, in classic live long enough to find yourself the villain fashion, who have become afraid of pushing buttons, and have become ravenous dogmatists for the tyranny of the legible.
The legible is not only that which can be easily read or explained, but that which is absent of ambiguity whatever. Instantly I could tell this is not keyed into our current political moment by virtue of the fact that California and Texas had banded together to seceed from the Union. It’s a purple nurple concession to the bipartisan—what if the bluest state and the reddest state actually had something in common? That something is never explored, however; we’re meant to take it on faith that California and Texas would find some common ground. I’m not the only to find this odd, surely, and it points to Garland’s poor sleight of hand: to make something that resembles the shocking, alludes to the electrifying, and ignores the legitimately contentious. This is but one example, of which in this two hour film I could pull hundreds. Questions of race and gender are skirted. Commentary on How We Live Now is garbled and plastic. And no, Garland’s rendering of the assassination of the President of the United States does not “go there”. Not new, not bold. I'd have been better off staying at home replaying The Last of Us or rewatching Children of Men.
Spits on the legacy of Suicide, by the way; Garland should be ashamed for some of these needle drops.
We’re so fucked.
