Because social media tends to increase general insanity, we’ve had open American-civil-war talk online for a few years now.
I don’t use the word “insane” lightly. The speculators of this civil-war possibility are entirely living in their own hypothetical nonsense world, one centered on destruction and nihilism. (Because as I occasionally say to students, if you are rooting for any war these days, you are rooting for rape, starvation, and all manner of degeneracy you hate.)
That’s my opinion of course, yet these civil-war speculators have not told us 1) who is fighting whom, 2) why they are fighting, 3) what causes would prompt Americans to fight each other to the death.
For this scenario to really unfold, I’m still waiting on something even a tiny bit remotely plausible. Back in 1860, they had strong loyalty to home states, slavery, national unity, and manly honor. Today, all I see is commerce, porn, gambling, gaming, and 401ks, the stuff of individual dreams, but not anything to create such intense social cohesiveness that you would pick up an M15 and shoot it at the largest military in world history that can obliterate everything in five miles of you right now.
Along comes “Civil War,” promising via the trailer to be a visual experience of this insane speculative possibility. And who would’ve guessed it prominently features a subject the speculators have long been dreaming about?
I’m talking, of course and as you could guess, about the usual subject of conversation when civil-war talk comes up: photojournalism.
A great big chunk of this movie is dedicated to the nature and duties of wartime photojournalists, complete with plenty of freeze-frame stills of the photos they take during this future American civil war.
The plot centers on that topic. A team of Reuters journalists decides to travel via a Suburban from NYC to DC, to interview the President, whose forces are battling the secessionist Western Forces. The team picks up a rival New York Times journalist and a young woman, whose dream it is to become a wartime photographer.
Shoot, we have a hard time getting anybody interested in journalism at our university, and yet magically in this movie we’ve got the most eager young person today dying to be a journo!
Her idol is Lee Miller (Kirsten Dunst), a photographer for Reuters. The world-weary Miller doesn’t want to take the kid along, but soon enough she’s the Obi-Wan to her Luke, teaching the ways of how to shoot photos of people getting killed.
The strong long hope of the journos is to get a shot of the President being shot by Western Forces. Get it? Shot and “shot.” The journalists are almost-soldiers.
Now according to the Law of Mediocre Movies, only two things can happen when a reluctant veteran takes up the task of training a plucky youngster. One is the youngster will die and the veteran will end up mourning deeply that loss, or the other is that the veteran will die helping the youngster.
Ladies and gentlemen, you saw my rating above. No spoilers here, so you can figure out, based on that rating, if one of those two results happens.
Anyway, the movie roadtrips from NYC to DC, via Pittsburgh and Charlottesville, because the interstate highways around Philadelphia have been “vaporized.” The journalists zip like maggots to rotten meat towards any military action. We see them follow the troops along — which side they are following, we don’t know — as they hope to get the shots and the stories of a lifetime.
All the while, the US is undergoing a terrible Civil War. Why? We don’t know.
Who are the sides? We don’t really know that either, except to be told that Texas and California form the secessionist Western Forces, battling I think the East Coast, and that people in Missouri and Colorado are sitting this one out on their farms.
What are the causes of the war? Again, we don’t know. It *could* be that the President is a dictatorial figure, since we hear he has served three terms.
But all in all, no clear sides are mentioned or discussed. The movie is largely context-less, and it provides nearly no plausible basis for its future speculations. The dollar has probably collapsed, and yet this movie shows a functioning New York City, so I am lost as to how and why there’s a war and why anybody is fighting anybody else.
I can’t tell you how stupid I felt watching it.
How in the world are Texas and California combining to attack NYC and Washington DC, to overthrow the President? Speculation is that the English director-screenwriter, Alex Garland, doesn’t have a clue about current American politics. He may also be taking creative license in speculative science-fiction.
Either way, I’m betting that many level-headed people will laugh at what this movie assumes might happen, because it seems less possible than “Lord of the Rings” and “My Little Pony.”
Really, the movie wants to be an anti-war film, I think — that’s the best I can say about it. The journalists witness about five atrocities on their trip, and it’s deliberately unclear which side is responsible. One scene, the most harrowing, has them cornered by soldiers shooting people at a mass-grave site. These guys are shooting anybody who is not “American,” which is defined as being from Florida, Missouri and Colorado, but not Hong Kong. Are they anti-immigration types? The best we have to go on is the psycho-leader (Jesse Plemons in a cameo) wears weird red-lens glasses. Is he MAGA?
Yet until the last act, I couldn’t tell who’s US military and who’s the Western Forces. And that’s certainly deliberate. Nobody in the audience could get offended here, since nobody is being blamed for being bad.
Well, except that most of the atrocities are committed by dumb hick white guys, of course.
A science-fiction movie like this can be divided up in two ways, and you can’t have one of these without the other. That is, you could see this movie as a commentary on the present, circa 2024, and you could see it speculating about the near-future.
Let’s take the near-future track first.
In this future world, there are no drones, no bodycams, no advanced weapons beyond anything you can see in Ridley Scott’s 2000 movie “Black Hawk Down.”
There are also no cellphones.
Please read that again — no cellphones. The journalists in this movie never write an article, never publish anything, are never in contact with a central headquarters. They text no one. They use film. They don’t shoot digital photos that they could send to Reuters in the blink of an eye. Again, we have no plausible reasons given for this scenario. Are all the Internet satellites shot down to hell?
As far as drones, I can’t be more bugged about a missing feature than this, even the cellphone part. If you are taking pictures nowadays and want to avoid a warzone while seeing things you can’t get to, you get a drone. Half of the scenes in “Civil War” involve journalists right next to soldiers when they don’t need to be. In other words, this movie puts its characters in ridiculous places for suspense without justification. I say this because — mild spoiler — when one character is killed near the end, it’s done for dramatic effect but it makes absolutely no sense to me.
So anyway, is this movie saying that all drones, all celltowers, any communication is just down because reasons? Well, what reasons?!?!
With this alone, I wonder on what speculative basis the movie was created. This is the massive moral sin of the movie. While it uses the insane discourse of civil war to present us with a violent picture of a possible future, it does not take seriously its audience’s need for plausibility. I would call this one of the cardinal crimes of science fiction, if not the cardinal crime.
So, now we are left with the second way to approach this movie, which is that it’s about the present day
For the life of me, I couldn’t imagine it saying anything except trite things about the present. One, war is bad, except when it’s cool-looking on film. Two, journalists must be brave, daring, and cold.
Besides that, I think it might be telling us that journalism and politics are divorced, that journalism cares only about the story and the sensationalism of — nah, this isn’t it. Best I can do here is say that warzone journalists endure great hardships. The young female protagonist has to learn that.
If you knew that already, this movie can be skipped, since it’s got cardboard characters with little charisma and the plot arc is no better than a videogame fetch quest.
Moreover, the plausibility of secessionist forces allowing Reuters journalists to follow them around just boggles my mind. I say that because I live in one of the reddest counties you can imagine. There is no will to secede from the US here. The red-staters love their farm subsidies and their Social Security payments, so why would they turn on Uncle Sam? That’s before we get to the question of why these red-staters would team up with what they consider to be the ultra-liberal government of the state of California.
But there’s one thing these people do hate, and that’s mainstream journalism. This movie ignores that totally obvious reality, shown in any opinion poll you can find. It just blithely assumes that whoever’s fighting in a civil war will honor the “Press” and the press credentials of these journalists. I don’t think Mr. Garland is aware of how much many people today think that the New York Times and Reuters are the real bad guys, in league with the current powers-that-be.
Moreover, have the moviemakers never heard of false journalists? As in soldiers who pass for journalists by using “Press” to get into places? Yet the soldiers in this movie are extremely high-trust. When you get in war, you get a lot of fakes. Who is going to believe that these journos are the real deal? The answer, stupidly, is every soldier in the movie.
Returning to insanity, “Civil War” has decided to that the future speculative possibility of American civil war should be half-baked, mostly impossible, not rationalized, and yet still sensationalized. I believe that in cases like this, art should not, for the most part, be envisioning such a nightmare for us *unless it has strong wisdom to offer.* Otherwise, it can be seen as encouraging delusions around sociopolitical division.
On that basis, this is one of the most irresponsible films I’ve seen in a long time.