When I first saw it, I think last year, the clips from this trailer gave me chills. It had that spark of immediacy and plausibility, a scent of realness. And obviously, the notion of a second civil war or other violent bifurcation of America has been part of the discourse for years. But I suspect the only thing this movie foretells is the spike in guns sales it will likely inspire.
I always recall Chris Hedges’s (speaking of war correspondents) argument that all wars have a myth and a reality to why they’re fought, and the reality is always economic (at least, that’s my recollection from my reading of his War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning from over a decade ago). What’s missing from the formula that sets the stage for this sort of split is economic hardship. There’s of course rampant inequality in this richest of all nations, but, despite what either side of the aisle likes to infer when convenient, we’re nowhere near the rampant and persistent poverty that feeds the widespread desperation and subsequent political will necessary, never mind unshared history, for civil war such as in the nations you mentioned. Understanding of course that a country need not have an actual majority calling for massive internal strife—a well-organized and strategically excellent minority force capable of inflicting significant threat could spark a snowballing over-reaction, but I don’t think that force actually exists. I suspect that even the right-wing militias now “operating” in the US are mostly cosplaying when it comes down to it, showing up for Likes, a sense of identity and out of boredom. Cospatriotism is a paper eagle. January 6 and the Trump presidency (hopefully) exposed for us many things, but I was surprised as anything to see how resilient—albeit perplexing, cynical and sometimes base—our democracy is.
WNYC interviewed Lynsey Addario (who’s covered Afghanistan, Darfur, Iraq and Libya) and she basically said what the film lacks is coverage of how average Joes and Janes last through the war. She also said that Lee’s central conceit is somewhat inaccurate--her observation is that she and other war correspondents actually grow more emotional the longer they work in the field. (see https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/articles/a-war-photographer-watches-alex-garlands-civil-war?tab=transcript)
I like your review even though i disagree with it. It is my favorite negative review of the film. I can even understand why it left you cold.
I did not think the film was perfect, but I will say the film was not apolitical. It just doesn't spoon feed us. The president is a fascist. An actual dictator not a rhetorical one. In such a situation, a civil war is justified. Not a flurry of memes, etc. The repulsion during the De La Soul execution scene and during the end just remind me that even I am too much of a lapdog to stomach the correct -- the only -- response to fascism.
RE: The Last of Us, did you play the game? I did and friends who played the game said nope. But you might sway me. Anyway let me stop dawdling and write.
I never played the game, which probably made me like the show more. No experience with the source material.
I'm not convinced a fascist in the U.S. would provoke a civil war if economic conditions remained sound. China has maintained fascism because the country got richer. That could change in the coming years as growth slows and inequality rises and people stop tolerating the absence of civil liberties. America, of course, has a tradition of freedom that is not easily taken away. I think, ultimately, the fascism you might see in the U.S. will be of the "soft" variety, versions of the Patriot Act, surveillance, the steady curtailment of civil liberties, speech, etc.
But I am an optimist. American democracy will exist in 2100, that's my prediction.
Just to be clear, it's not like the fascism would necessarily happen. I was talking more in "what if" terms, which I think Garland was as well. As for the ensuing war, I think that's what should happen and I believe that Garland does as well. Which would be a good explanation for why he chooses relatively cynical photogs as the focus as opposed to freedom fighters. A film from the rebels' perspective would be locked in a vault.
I do discuss politics on my Substack (Cross Current) but you are way more of an expert than I am, or Garland for that matter. I submit this might have been your sticking point. You're too close to it. If someone made a movie about Substack writers we would both loathe it regardless of how accurate it was. We know the 100% truth of the subject.
FWIW, I don't think you're a lapdog for being repulsed there. It's one thing to kill Hitler; it's another thing entirely to pose for a group photo with his corpse. People in this comment section and elsewhere keep describing the film's ending using words like "Fuhrerbunker," but all I could think of when I saw this film's final shot was Abu Ghraib.
(Personally, the sense that there is a level of cruelty that we should never stoop to, even in a wartime setting, is pretty strongly linked to the reasons I find fascist ideology so abhorrent in the first place!)
I was shocked by how boring the movie was. As you say, tedious. How do you make a lavishly funded movie about the violent collapse of the greatest empire the world has ever known and have it so boring? Kind of amazing when you think about it. I mean it wasn’t just a little boring, it was hard to maintain your interest enough to sit through it. It felt like the movie was more interested in long therapy sessions about the trauma of being a generic war photographer than it was in the world it was set in.
I think that is the point - the film is about how the media portray war rather than the civil war itself I think. As for boring, war in reality is actually long stretches of mind numbing tedium punctuated by short frenetic moments of violence - not for nothing that "hurry up and wait" is a saying among soldiers!
Right there with you. Laughably ahistorical. Well shot, well directed action flick. But the civil war part was a nothing burger. Shame because he had an opportunity here.
Huh, this is a really interesting review. I found The Last of Us unwatchably formulaic (second episode excepted), but I mostly liked Civil War and I mostly thought that objections to its insufficient "world building" missed what was interesting about the movie. The whole film was trying to take the style and cliches of western war reporting and reproduce them in an American context. It did this in a really vivid and powerful way that makes the semi-conscious anxieties of American liberals photographically real. The endgame, where the paraphernalia of American Presidential power that have been mythologized in a thousand films become something like the Fürherbunker or one of Saddam's palaces (another familiar visual cliche) really worked for me.
I thought objections to the lack of political realism (why California and Texas?) were mostly off-base and came from people too used to reading fantasy novels with appendixes. There was a civil war; the detail are cloudy. That's most of what you need, if something like what's depicted in the movie were to happen the factional divisions would depend on where the rebelling military units were, not voting patters. In fact the details aren't that cloudy: the President is pseudo-Trump; he seized power in a way that lead to a civil war; the war has been so brutalizing that the factions opposed to him may be no better. We are supposed to thrill when pseudo-Trump is summarily executed and then question our reaction.
The good objection "world-building" objection, which you are the only one I've read make, is what the hell do the journalists think they are doing? Who is the audience who will reward them for their work? Are they reporting to Canada because the Civil War is localized to the US and the international community is considering intervening (that isn't *realistic* but it could make sense in the movie word)? Shouldn't the young reporter be hardened by the experience of growing up in a Civil War instead of being a gen Z caricature who needs to learn from a grizzled gen X mentor? (Kristin Dunst tells her to always wear a helmet and then they are the only people not wearing helmets in a bunch of intense shootouts...) Although the acting is good, the characters are a bunch of dumb flat cliches, including the emotional sexy Latino and the wise Black mentor who dies.
Fair points! To your last one, yeah, that's where I was ... who is their audience, exactly? It'd almost work better if they were all British or German correspondents dropping into the U.S. to report on the carnage for their own countries. That's true about Jessie as well. Coming of age in such a world shouldn't make you such a snowflake, for lack of a better word. The characterization seemed off. I doubt there are any Jessie's wandering around Port-au-Prince right now ...
I thought that Houellebecq's Submission was interesting not because there's any prospect of France being taken over by Islamists, but because enough French people are worried about that prospect that it is revealing to imagine their fantasy become real. So I like the movie if I think of it as starting from the image of civil war and working backwards. Doing so means bringing in journalists and they are a bunch of cardboard cutouts. (The old cameras were such an annoying affectation, as if after the apocalypse you could only listen to jazz on vinyl.) I might have liked it better as a sort of fake docudrama.
A good comparison is maybe Coetzee's The Life and Times of Michael K, where you can sort of piece together the fact that Apartheid South Africa is disintegrating into a civil war, maybe because of a nuclear war between the 80s superpowers, but the story in the foreground is grounded and compelling.
Wagner Moura's character explicitly says he works for Reuters; Kirsten Dunst gets paid in Canadian money; the journalists we spend time with outside of the core four are, largely, not Americans. (I forget whether the embeds they meet up with at the film's climax are explicitly from the BBC or if I just assumed as much on account of the accents.) It's not explicit that most of them work for international news orgs, but I think that's just the film being in show-not-tell mode.
She carries Canadian with her but unclear that's how she's paid. Her employer is presumably Magnum but never actually specified. I'll respond to the other points later but it's odd to me to do dystopia/civil war and not mediate much on how media might change in such a scenario. The world-building is slack. Do 4 Americas get their own news? Does Sammy's NYT only report to Loyalists? Otherwise just make a movie about being a journalist in Haiti or Sudan or Syria. Doing it "in America" doesn't offer enough of a conceit without additional effort.
The problem is what do the American reporters think they are doing? She says every photo she took in a foreign war zone was a message home saying "don't do this." What does she think her photos mean now?
I don't think "what is she accomplishing with these photos?" is a plothole so much as the question animating "Civil War," and that it's pretty deliberate that the answer is "not much tbh." (I laid out the case for this elsewhere in this comment section.)
The first would be the rather odd comparison to Cormac McCarthy. McCarthy can get away with the vagueness of the apocalypse in "The Road" because the prose is so great; you nitpick this film's hazy apocalypse but then... admit that this film has some striking imagery. Aren't these two scenarios more or less analogous? Particularly because, ever since "Annihilation" Alex Garland has gone all in on being an imagery guy. I personally was much more interested in the imagery in this film than the specifics of the Texas-California anti-fascist union. (And I specifically find it weird how focused you are on the "spectacle" of the movie, as though it were wall-to-wall titillating shots of, like, the Lincoln Memorial getting napalmed! The trailers positioned the film like that, but the film itself is much more interested in rendering everyday Americana alien. The most beautiful image in the movie is of a sprinkler on a suburban lawn, ffs!)
The other thing is that, while this movie isn't really about a civil war, it's absolutely about our political moment. The throughline of this film, as I see it, is the tension between what journalism presents itself as and what journalism actually entails. "They shoot journalists on sight" in this universe, or so we are told - or rather, or so our heroes tell themselves, sitting around what's left of a swanky hotel in upscale NYC. (A swanky hotel in NYC where the lights keep going out and the elevators don't work is a really, really good metaphor for the news media today, incidentally.) And then they go on a road trip across America, where everyone from soldiers to gas station attendants pose for photos of the murders they're committing. The only time they're menaced is by the Jesse Plemons character, who couldn't care less that they're journalists because he's too busy playing eeny-meeny-miney-shoot-the-brown-guy.
Film imagery and prose aren't 1:1 to me, I think that's my aesthetic issue - I assign higher points for prose in part because there are a lot of pretty films out there, a lot of well-shot films, tech has made it so much more doable, whereas writing like McCarthy isn't turning up in most books. But The Road also surpasses Civil War on the level of human relationships. I could not be made to care about Lee, Joel, Jessie, or Sammy nearly as much; they slid dangerously close to stock character territory, Jessie's evolution didn't make sense if you consider, at the outset, she's been reared in this hellscape.
I agree with the journalism commentary and that's interesting to an extent. Journalists, in the U.S. certainly, vastly overrate how "dangerous" the job is. Foreign correspondents in war zones do have it much tougher. There's little in the U.S. that's physically threatening, including going to Trump rallies. (I did fine at them in 2016, I'm due for another.)
But the Plemons character is quite menacing! Also, what's the point? There are maniacs out in civil war America who want to kill foreigners? That scene to me, if chilling, was pure spectacle, and is precipitated by an insane coincidence: two other journalists Joel happens to know heading up the same rural roadway in the middle of nowhere, Jessie jumping cars, etc.
The funny thing is, I totally agree with your last paragraph there - the scene with Plemons is super contrived, not even in hindsight but in the minutes leading up to it. I quite literally thought in the theater, "oh, jeez, it's so obvious this scene is here so that there can be two more non-white characters for Jesse Plemons to point a gun at next scene." And then the scene happens and... it still is absolutely chilling! I would say having the scary stuff telegraphed so clearly in a movie, and then having it *still* be effective when drained of its surprise, is very praise-worthy.
I admit that these characters are archetypes, for the most part, but since I thought this was on some level a horror movie I didn't mind too much. The exception here is Jessie, who I think makes plenty of sense both within and outside the world of the movie. She's from one of those head-in-the-sand white rural communities that can afford to just wait out the civil war (what does the too-blase cashier at the thrift store say? "we watch the news and it looks pretty bad and stuff," or something like that), but she doesn't want to sit idly by; photography is her trade, but her dream is to be a hero. But while she's not deliberately ignorant, her vision of the journalist-hero is clouded in nostalgia: when Jessie notes at the film's start that Dunst's character is named after Lee Miller, her conflation of the two is an early hint that she is operating under an outdated assumption of what journalism entails. It's very telling that, as Lee notes, Jessie's bringing an ancient analog camera (a black-and-white one, no less!) to a war zone.
Your news career was/is much more successful than my abortive go at it (and I mostly fell into the job anyway), so maybe I'm overstating this person's prevalence, but we've both met that kind of cub journalist: the one with no firsthand memory of 9/11 but who nonetheless imagines him/herself as an inheritor of the legacy of Woodward and Bernstein. I see a lot of that person in Jessie, but I also see a lot of Jessie in, say, the Columbia undergrad protestors looking to party like it's 1968. Jessie is not a "snowflake"; she is a larper. The grim joke of "Civil War," IMO, is that on some level, Lee and Joel are larpers too; they too are tagalongs being humored by the actual agents in this war.
That's a good point about her being a larper, and the commentary on the media. I found it curious how closely Lee and Joel tagged along with their cameras and how they were, in every sense, humored.
Look, I’ll admit I walked out of this movie halfway through because, as the man said, I found it extremely tedious and I had other things to do that evening. So I don’t know the full movie. But I feel the defenders of this movie are not coming to grips with the boringness of it. What really got me were these long endless dialogues between journalists about how traumatic it was to see dead bodies or whatever. I mean I truly truly did not care about a 19 year old apprentice photographer getting over her disgust reaction at corpses, that sort of psychodrama is not what I came to see, but it felt like that was half the movie. Perhaps the movie redeemed itself at the end, I wouldn’t know.
When I first saw it, I think last year, the clips from this trailer gave me chills. It had that spark of immediacy and plausibility, a scent of realness. And obviously, the notion of a second civil war or other violent bifurcation of America has been part of the discourse for years. But I suspect the only thing this movie foretells is the spike in guns sales it will likely inspire.
I always recall Chris Hedges’s (speaking of war correspondents) argument that all wars have a myth and a reality to why they’re fought, and the reality is always economic (at least, that’s my recollection from my reading of his War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning from over a decade ago). What’s missing from the formula that sets the stage for this sort of split is economic hardship. There’s of course rampant inequality in this richest of all nations, but, despite what either side of the aisle likes to infer when convenient, we’re nowhere near the rampant and persistent poverty that feeds the widespread desperation and subsequent political will necessary, never mind unshared history, for civil war such as in the nations you mentioned. Understanding of course that a country need not have an actual majority calling for massive internal strife—a well-organized and strategically excellent minority force capable of inflicting significant threat could spark a snowballing over-reaction, but I don’t think that force actually exists. I suspect that even the right-wing militias now “operating” in the US are mostly cosplaying when it comes down to it, showing up for Likes, a sense of identity and out of boredom. Cospatriotism is a paper eagle. January 6 and the Trump presidency (hopefully) exposed for us many things, but I was surprised as anything to see how resilient—albeit perplexing, cynical and sometimes base—our democracy is.
I'd be very curious for Hedges' take, as well as anyone who has covered war
WNYC interviewed Lynsey Addario (who’s covered Afghanistan, Darfur, Iraq and Libya) and she basically said what the film lacks is coverage of how average Joes and Janes last through the war. She also said that Lee’s central conceit is somewhat inaccurate--her observation is that she and other war correspondents actually grow more emotional the longer they work in the field. (see https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/articles/a-war-photographer-watches-alex-garlands-civil-war?tab=transcript)
https://letterboxd.com/jakehanrahan/film/civil-war-2024/
I like your review even though i disagree with it. It is my favorite negative review of the film. I can even understand why it left you cold.
I did not think the film was perfect, but I will say the film was not apolitical. It just doesn't spoon feed us. The president is a fascist. An actual dictator not a rhetorical one. In such a situation, a civil war is justified. Not a flurry of memes, etc. The repulsion during the De La Soul execution scene and during the end just remind me that even I am too much of a lapdog to stomach the correct -- the only -- response to fascism.
RE: The Last of Us, did you play the game? I did and friends who played the game said nope. But you might sway me. Anyway let me stop dawdling and write.
I never played the game, which probably made me like the show more. No experience with the source material.
I'm not convinced a fascist in the U.S. would provoke a civil war if economic conditions remained sound. China has maintained fascism because the country got richer. That could change in the coming years as growth slows and inequality rises and people stop tolerating the absence of civil liberties. America, of course, has a tradition of freedom that is not easily taken away. I think, ultimately, the fascism you might see in the U.S. will be of the "soft" variety, versions of the Patriot Act, surveillance, the steady curtailment of civil liberties, speech, etc.
But I am an optimist. American democracy will exist in 2100, that's my prediction.
Just to be clear, it's not like the fascism would necessarily happen. I was talking more in "what if" terms, which I think Garland was as well. As for the ensuing war, I think that's what should happen and I believe that Garland does as well. Which would be a good explanation for why he chooses relatively cynical photogs as the focus as opposed to freedom fighters. A film from the rebels' perspective would be locked in a vault.
I do discuss politics on my Substack (Cross Current) but you are way more of an expert than I am, or Garland for that matter. I submit this might have been your sticking point. You're too close to it. If someone made a movie about Substack writers we would both loathe it regardless of how accurate it was. We know the 100% truth of the subject.
FWIW, I don't think you're a lapdog for being repulsed there. It's one thing to kill Hitler; it's another thing entirely to pose for a group photo with his corpse. People in this comment section and elsewhere keep describing the film's ending using words like "Fuhrerbunker," but all I could think of when I saw this film's final shot was Abu Ghraib.
(Personally, the sense that there is a level of cruelty that we should never stoop to, even in a wartime setting, is pretty strongly linked to the reasons I find fascist ideology so abhorrent in the first place!)
Well corny as it sounds, if a #1 film can engender discussions like this, I am hopeful for the future.
I was shocked by how boring the movie was. As you say, tedious. How do you make a lavishly funded movie about the violent collapse of the greatest empire the world has ever known and have it so boring? Kind of amazing when you think about it. I mean it wasn’t just a little boring, it was hard to maintain your interest enough to sit through it. It felt like the movie was more interested in long therapy sessions about the trauma of being a generic war photographer than it was in the world it was set in.
I think that is the point - the film is about how the media portray war rather than the civil war itself I think. As for boring, war in reality is actually long stretches of mind numbing tedium punctuated by short frenetic moments of violence - not for nothing that "hurry up and wait" is a saying among soldiers!
Right there with you. Laughably ahistorical. Well shot, well directed action flick. But the civil war part was a nothing burger. Shame because he had an opportunity here.
Huh, this is a really interesting review. I found The Last of Us unwatchably formulaic (second episode excepted), but I mostly liked Civil War and I mostly thought that objections to its insufficient "world building" missed what was interesting about the movie. The whole film was trying to take the style and cliches of western war reporting and reproduce them in an American context. It did this in a really vivid and powerful way that makes the semi-conscious anxieties of American liberals photographically real. The endgame, where the paraphernalia of American Presidential power that have been mythologized in a thousand films become something like the Fürherbunker or one of Saddam's palaces (another familiar visual cliche) really worked for me.
I thought objections to the lack of political realism (why California and Texas?) were mostly off-base and came from people too used to reading fantasy novels with appendixes. There was a civil war; the detail are cloudy. That's most of what you need, if something like what's depicted in the movie were to happen the factional divisions would depend on where the rebelling military units were, not voting patters. In fact the details aren't that cloudy: the President is pseudo-Trump; he seized power in a way that lead to a civil war; the war has been so brutalizing that the factions opposed to him may be no better. We are supposed to thrill when pseudo-Trump is summarily executed and then question our reaction.
The good objection "world-building" objection, which you are the only one I've read make, is what the hell do the journalists think they are doing? Who is the audience who will reward them for their work? Are they reporting to Canada because the Civil War is localized to the US and the international community is considering intervening (that isn't *realistic* but it could make sense in the movie word)? Shouldn't the young reporter be hardened by the experience of growing up in a Civil War instead of being a gen Z caricature who needs to learn from a grizzled gen X mentor? (Kristin Dunst tells her to always wear a helmet and then they are the only people not wearing helmets in a bunch of intense shootouts...) Although the acting is good, the characters are a bunch of dumb flat cliches, including the emotional sexy Latino and the wise Black mentor who dies.
Fair points! To your last one, yeah, that's where I was ... who is their audience, exactly? It'd almost work better if they were all British or German correspondents dropping into the U.S. to report on the carnage for their own countries. That's true about Jessie as well. Coming of age in such a world shouldn't make you such a snowflake, for lack of a better word. The characterization seemed off. I doubt there are any Jessie's wandering around Port-au-Prince right now ...
I thought that Houellebecq's Submission was interesting not because there's any prospect of France being taken over by Islamists, but because enough French people are worried about that prospect that it is revealing to imagine their fantasy become real. So I like the movie if I think of it as starting from the image of civil war and working backwards. Doing so means bringing in journalists and they are a bunch of cardboard cutouts. (The old cameras were such an annoying affectation, as if after the apocalypse you could only listen to jazz on vinyl.) I might have liked it better as a sort of fake docudrama.
A good comparison is maybe Coetzee's The Life and Times of Michael K, where you can sort of piece together the fact that Apartheid South Africa is disintegrating into a civil war, maybe because of a nuclear war between the 80s superpowers, but the story in the foreground is grounded and compelling.
Wagner Moura's character explicitly says he works for Reuters; Kirsten Dunst gets paid in Canadian money; the journalists we spend time with outside of the core four are, largely, not Americans. (I forget whether the embeds they meet up with at the film's climax are explicitly from the BBC or if I just assumed as much on account of the accents.) It's not explicit that most of them work for international news orgs, but I think that's just the film being in show-not-tell mode.
She carries Canadian with her but unclear that's how she's paid. Her employer is presumably Magnum but never actually specified. I'll respond to the other points later but it's odd to me to do dystopia/civil war and not mediate much on how media might change in such a scenario. The world-building is slack. Do 4 Americas get their own news? Does Sammy's NYT only report to Loyalists? Otherwise just make a movie about being a journalist in Haiti or Sudan or Syria. Doing it "in America" doesn't offer enough of a conceit without additional effort.
The problem is what do the American reporters think they are doing? She says every photo she took in a foreign war zone was a message home saying "don't do this." What does she think her photos mean now?
I don't think "what is she accomplishing with these photos?" is a plothole so much as the question animating "Civil War," and that it's pretty deliberate that the answer is "not much tbh." (I laid out the case for this elsewhere in this comment section.)
I'm a bit surprised by this review on two levels.
The first would be the rather odd comparison to Cormac McCarthy. McCarthy can get away with the vagueness of the apocalypse in "The Road" because the prose is so great; you nitpick this film's hazy apocalypse but then... admit that this film has some striking imagery. Aren't these two scenarios more or less analogous? Particularly because, ever since "Annihilation" Alex Garland has gone all in on being an imagery guy. I personally was much more interested in the imagery in this film than the specifics of the Texas-California anti-fascist union. (And I specifically find it weird how focused you are on the "spectacle" of the movie, as though it were wall-to-wall titillating shots of, like, the Lincoln Memorial getting napalmed! The trailers positioned the film like that, but the film itself is much more interested in rendering everyday Americana alien. The most beautiful image in the movie is of a sprinkler on a suburban lawn, ffs!)
The other thing is that, while this movie isn't really about a civil war, it's absolutely about our political moment. The throughline of this film, as I see it, is the tension between what journalism presents itself as and what journalism actually entails. "They shoot journalists on sight" in this universe, or so we are told - or rather, or so our heroes tell themselves, sitting around what's left of a swanky hotel in upscale NYC. (A swanky hotel in NYC where the lights keep going out and the elevators don't work is a really, really good metaphor for the news media today, incidentally.) And then they go on a road trip across America, where everyone from soldiers to gas station attendants pose for photos of the murders they're committing. The only time they're menaced is by the Jesse Plemons character, who couldn't care less that they're journalists because he's too busy playing eeny-meeny-miney-shoot-the-brown-guy.
Film imagery and prose aren't 1:1 to me, I think that's my aesthetic issue - I assign higher points for prose in part because there are a lot of pretty films out there, a lot of well-shot films, tech has made it so much more doable, whereas writing like McCarthy isn't turning up in most books. But The Road also surpasses Civil War on the level of human relationships. I could not be made to care about Lee, Joel, Jessie, or Sammy nearly as much; they slid dangerously close to stock character territory, Jessie's evolution didn't make sense if you consider, at the outset, she's been reared in this hellscape.
I agree with the journalism commentary and that's interesting to an extent. Journalists, in the U.S. certainly, vastly overrate how "dangerous" the job is. Foreign correspondents in war zones do have it much tougher. There's little in the U.S. that's physically threatening, including going to Trump rallies. (I did fine at them in 2016, I'm due for another.)
But the Plemons character is quite menacing! Also, what's the point? There are maniacs out in civil war America who want to kill foreigners? That scene to me, if chilling, was pure spectacle, and is precipitated by an insane coincidence: two other journalists Joel happens to know heading up the same rural roadway in the middle of nowhere, Jessie jumping cars, etc.
The funny thing is, I totally agree with your last paragraph there - the scene with Plemons is super contrived, not even in hindsight but in the minutes leading up to it. I quite literally thought in the theater, "oh, jeez, it's so obvious this scene is here so that there can be two more non-white characters for Jesse Plemons to point a gun at next scene." And then the scene happens and... it still is absolutely chilling! I would say having the scary stuff telegraphed so clearly in a movie, and then having it *still* be effective when drained of its surprise, is very praise-worthy.
I admit that these characters are archetypes, for the most part, but since I thought this was on some level a horror movie I didn't mind too much. The exception here is Jessie, who I think makes plenty of sense both within and outside the world of the movie. She's from one of those head-in-the-sand white rural communities that can afford to just wait out the civil war (what does the too-blase cashier at the thrift store say? "we watch the news and it looks pretty bad and stuff," or something like that), but she doesn't want to sit idly by; photography is her trade, but her dream is to be a hero. But while she's not deliberately ignorant, her vision of the journalist-hero is clouded in nostalgia: when Jessie notes at the film's start that Dunst's character is named after Lee Miller, her conflation of the two is an early hint that she is operating under an outdated assumption of what journalism entails. It's very telling that, as Lee notes, Jessie's bringing an ancient analog camera (a black-and-white one, no less!) to a war zone.
Your news career was/is much more successful than my abortive go at it (and I mostly fell into the job anyway), so maybe I'm overstating this person's prevalence, but we've both met that kind of cub journalist: the one with no firsthand memory of 9/11 but who nonetheless imagines him/herself as an inheritor of the legacy of Woodward and Bernstein. I see a lot of that person in Jessie, but I also see a lot of Jessie in, say, the Columbia undergrad protestors looking to party like it's 1968. Jessie is not a "snowflake"; she is a larper. The grim joke of "Civil War," IMO, is that on some level, Lee and Joel are larpers too; they too are tagalongs being humored by the actual agents in this war.
That's a good point about her being a larper, and the commentary on the media. I found it curious how closely Lee and Joel tagged along with their cameras and how they were, in every sense, humored.
Look, I’ll admit I walked out of this movie halfway through because, as the man said, I found it extremely tedious and I had other things to do that evening. So I don’t know the full movie. But I feel the defenders of this movie are not coming to grips with the boringness of it. What really got me were these long endless dialogues between journalists about how traumatic it was to see dead bodies or whatever. I mean I truly truly did not care about a 19 year old apprentice photographer getting over her disgust reaction at corpses, that sort of psychodrama is not what I came to see, but it felt like that was half the movie. Perhaps the movie redeemed itself at the end, I wouldn’t know.
Ha, it wasn't bad enough to walk out on! I'm like a 6/10 on it but I can see your point. The psychodrama, not that compelling.
When I was growing up, we saw movies like Failsafe, Seven Days in May , Dr. Strangelove (a headscratcher to our parents) and The War Game.
They had their flaws but they all had some good takeaways.
I haven't seen this but I might advise us to be cautious in overanalyzing and overcriticizing.
For some, it might be an initial exposure to some ideas that are communicated through the power of cinema.
I see no reason to watch doom porn; who needs it?