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Civil War Is a Brutal, Intense No-Sidesing of American Political Divisions

8 0
12.04.2024

Movies

Peter Suderman | 4.12.2024 10:40 AM

It is at least a little bit ironic that a movie titled Civil War, about a broken America at war with itself, is designed in a way that ensures that it will be divisive. For myself, I found it stirring, stunning, and cunningly crafted. It's a hell of a movie, and with some caveats, a remarkable feat of filmmaking.

But there is no doubt that it is very much a provocation, and it provokes as much by what it leaves out as by what it includes.

That's because Civil War is a political movie with no overt politics. It's a war movie in which the nature of the dispute is wholly unclear. It's a movie about journalism and journalistic ethics in which the media as we know it is a hollowed-out shell of itself, almost an afterthought. It's an of-the-moment, extrapolated-from-the-thinkpieces movie about a polarized and divided country that refuses to either explain the causes of that division or propose anything like a solution. If you're looking for a headline, a diagnosis, a lead, a thesis sentence, a compact Tweetable lesson, a talking point for a cable news roundtable, you won't find it. Civil War is designed to leave you feeling empty, exhausted, and adrift. It's a war movie without a take.

Written and directed by Alex Garland, the writer behind The Beach and 28 Days Later and the mastermind behind Ex Machina, Annihilation, and the still-underappreciated Devs, Civil War is not quite a science fiction movie, but it bears some of the same genre hallmarks. It's a dystopian thought experiment about the nature of humanity and morality in a world........

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