It's a new Civil War that strikes the United States, portrayed by Alex Garland in his latest film, Civil War. This much-anticipated A24 production broke all the records of the inde-American studio. Does the arrival of A24 in the courtyard of the Greats mark a significant revival for the war cinema? Decryption written with four hands for this societal film in trompe-l'oeil and put in perspective with the freedom of the press increasingly threatened in the world.
The interview of the century
Demonstration surrounded by the police forces, unusual agitation, then the annihilating deflagration of a bomb attached to a juvenile suicide bomber that reduces the bodies amassed in this street to a cart... No, Civil War not place its opening scene in an exotic city at war in the Middle East, but in the heart of Brooklyn. War reporter Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst) is on site, robbing his camera to this America in a bloody split between a seditious coalition formed between California and Texas and a president trying to maintain what remains of his country. Feeling approaching the end of this tarnished politician in Washington, the reporter accompanied by a crazy journalist (Wagner Moura), a veteran of the press (Stephen McKinley Henderson) and a very young photographer (Cailee Spaeny), all determined to achieve the biggest coup of their career: to make the ultimate interview of this political leader on decline.
This dear Alex Garland This was not the case, and it must be said that the announcement of this project Civil War and the first images of the trailer had more to excite the viewer. He who was the scriptwriter Danny Boyle (The Beach, Sunshine, 28 days later...) and which also keeps the same post for the next project of the British director 28 years laterhad been able to negotiate the turn in his career that had been his transition to realization. Ten years ago, Ex Machina was generally very positively welcomed by the critics, and Annihilation for Netflix had received a less favourable reception but contained within it a true imagery of SF-horrific never seen elsewhere as much as a very good adaptation from the beginning of the brilliant trilogy of the Rempart of Jeff VanderMeer.
He then returned in 2020 for a mini-series of eight episodes at the crossroads between science fiction and thriller, Devs, before returning to the big screen within the A24 fashion stable with the disturbing Men. In short, a sacredly solid resume for those who promised a true fresco of war in a post-Trump America resolutely fractured... But what is this worth? Civil WarWho so scares the crowds across the Atlantic?
War movie?
In terms of references, Garland does not go with the back of the spoon. Helicopters troubling the tranquillity of an orange, slow and murderous dawn rising towards a goal that seems unreachable, no doubt, Revelation Now is not far in the spirit of the British director. But where Coppola In fact, Garland seems to be constantly trying to magnify the heinous violence that is poking the boots of his group of journalists on their way to Washington. A less raw lens than hoped.
Explosion of colours that were better suited to a James Gunn filming Harley Quinn as a movie « realistic » on the job of reporting in the midst of civil war, we find everywhere this desire derealiser to breathe a pop tune into his feature film. Nails of solitary soldiers blazed with colours, scenes of ultra-violence bathed in tarantine pop music, over-stylization of a burning scene, Garland seems perfectly incapable of filming the ultra-violence of his film without overreacting. First black dot for this Son of Man in MDMA, where the substance struggles to dialogue with the form.
Garland and Symbolism
Garland used us to his taste for symbolism, finding his climax in the horrific (and latest) Men. Sometimes subtle, sometimes overly heavy, this taste of symbols continues in Civil WarAnd usually for the worst... Construction of a futile (and rather insane) mirror game between the young photographer and the character incarnated by Kirsten Dunst, the entire scene of exchange of shots between snipers in Christmas decorations (see Garland's analysis of the scene in person in the video available below) or this image of soldiers shooting at bazooka on the Lincoln Memorial...
Civil War will stack his symbols and war images on each other, in a rather crude way and most often excavating any political vein to his feature film... He will also have fun scattering tape-in-the-eye style effects, including a floppy of vividly marked scenes of chromatic aberration, without ever appearing to have any meaning within the feature film or supporting a desire for aesthetic research, if not experimental. And unfortunately, the whole is an indigestible bit to look at.
Noise and fury
As soon as the project was announced and the first images were released, America divided by Civil War created a schism among the reactions of the spectators... His registration so soon after the events of the Capitol and his arrival on the screens just six months before the electrifying presidential election in the USA had been able to create a virulent debate even before the film was visible to the general public. And as soon as it was made available on the screens, the numbers spoke of themselves: better start for A24 (before several blockbusters) and the first time for the trendy New York studio that is at the head of the box office.
A feature film that is therefore part of a burning news, within a country that never seems to have been so polarized. The ideal cocktail to make a flamboyant economic bomb! Civil War has mastered his communication perfectly and now puts his pockets full, brazing in the first places of a box-office decidedly well lucrative. But does he at the same time manage to become a political bomb, which scratches where it hurts? The answer seems much less obvious if we ignore its success in the hall.
Journalism as a tomb?
How can we succeed in making a film in homage to war journalism without paying tribute to it? It is the bitter feeling that remains in our throat at the end of a session that was hoped to be less calibrated for the consumption of popcorns. A missed opportunity or a binding general public specification? As the spectre of the civil war continues to hover in the increasingly browner air of America after taking the capitol, Alex Garland has deliberately ignored the insidious and deeply plotting climate that the Trump presidency has been waging.
Worse still, it only touches upon or caricatures the profession by taking up the debilitating grammar of the Hollywood tropes. The journalists are grimmed in cool and broken necks, pseudos made up of anonymized war heroes and whose psychology, not even primary motivations other than « live or die ». Patriotism doesn't matter, as long as we take up arms. All right. Trauma is only a matter of a short temporary nerve attack before starting again.
Do not seek further politicization of a conflict as presented, as if civil war were a state and an end in itself. Civil War There's not much to say about that. Hide those Republicans that we cannot see, we should not upset the American audience for the first more consensual A24 project as mentioned above. It was much less cleavage to unite California and the Texans than anything against them today, who wage a fierce struggle against these supposed fanatics. « awake ». Graland wisely prefers to free himself from realism without going into pure and hard dystopia as the very radical did. New Order. This is good because the hypothesis of a civil war is no longer so far-fetched that Civil War I'm sorry to hear that.
The latent racism that prevails in the USA is suggested only in one of the few notable sequences of the film (although already seen and with the sadly predictable outcome) where death seems to be dictated by the Russian roulette of an insurgent little calibrated on reflection. The grievances could still be pursued in other areas. In a fractured America that has never fully separated itself from its colonial and slave heritage, making the choice of silence about the persecutions of racialized people seems also disconnected from contemporary American society. A country where criminal and repressive policy targets black populations in the front line, as the case has been sadly shown George Floyd which set America on fire. There is no doubt that in the event of a civil war, the American cleavage would also translate into racial considerations, and not only by the prism of federal states having lent allegiance to one or the other... But not at Garland's! Here civil war is a matter of individualism as the ultimate consecration of the sacrosanct second amendment. For the context, we'll go back.
Civil War therefore deprives itself of any committed prospect. What a mistake when the year 2023 was particularly black for the profession in the various theatres of operation that ignite the globe but also in the so-called countries of the free world. Press freedom has suffered from numerous political assassinations in recent years and not just any. We are naturally thinking of The Khashoggi case, a committed journalist who was dismembered living in the consulate of Saudi Arabia in Turkey, all this for having undermined the reputation of the Saudi prince by his investigations. As a symbol of the impunity of the powerful, the case had little to do with the Western chancelleries, anxious not to grieve our exchanges with the Gulf countries (and for France to pursue the sales of gusts without anicroche with one of its most loyal buyers of petromonarchies). Whatever happens, respect for human rights is secondary to imperialist considerations and other projects of regional domination. Provided that public opinion does not grasp the maneuver as with Vietnam yesterday or Gaza today.
An apolitical film for the American public
This year, 2023, numerous barbaric killings have choked many voices of reporters and whistleblowers from Mexican civil society. The latter denounced the corruption and influence of drug traffickers in a cartel-run country to abound in a (very) cocaine-seeking market, starting with Europe. As a cynicist, Iran will have surpassed its own record of political opponents' executions against a backdrop of fierce repression of the movement Women Life Freedom.
In the Middle East, since Israel's revengeful reprisals following the October 7 massacre, more than one hundred Palestinian journalists have already been eliminated during the bombings orchestrated for postmodern convenience by AIs when they were not directly ordered by the IDF war cabinet. Simple collateral victims of a chafouin algorithm of course. Finally, symbol and not the least of a freedom in the dark, Julian Assange Still crashing in the cells of Belmarsh's high security prison, waiting for his final trial, whileEdward Snowden, exiled to Russia, disputes with him the title of public enemy number one of « the greatest democracy in the world ».
Here too, in the general indifference of public opinion to blindness that is bottled by garbage media where we are invited to « go try dictatorship in Russia » when it is not a question of benevolent condemnation of violence. Or how can we get rid of any analysis for another possible? So how can we explain such a poor speech on the part of Alex Garland about an increasingly perilous profession of exercise in the US and around the world, where this motherly freedom of all others is dangerously regressing?
The director seems to use journalism only as a pretext for an action film that is rather effective but not credible, whether it be the shooting sauce Call Of Duty or scenes of above ground war medicine. These characters present themselves as observers for others to testify. Not even a denunciation of the war crimes they attend. Journalism would therefore be a fixed exercise, deprived of the humanization of each other. Nothing, even when it comes to being an accomplice or witness to the horrors of war. It is forgotten that war photographers are often correspondents of the writings for which they write.
Here, they are simply portrayed as burned heads without any look (or so little) at the events they attend, as if the war photography were depriving themselves of a corner and that their fate as an American citizen was – moreover – completely indifferent to them. The photograph is instant as a disposable device. It's that we even sympathize with criminals after the assault. A very convenient positioning that takes a farce when we witness, stunned, the entrance into the capitol of our team of journalists decidedly suicidal and more going to war even more than the special forces left behind. The stereotype of youth « mad dog » will be declined until exhaustion.
War games
In the front line, to flirt with the gusts fed by the secessionists' assault rifles for a shot of Adrenaline, our heroes take on GI Joe's resemblance to amphetamines and camouflaged images. It would almost miss the TikTok selfie to complete the portrait. Such a clean vision is indoor fun, while the Ukrainian front lines do not allow anything to filter after two years of conflict. The same is true for the Gaza Strip, where the population and the defenders of public freedoms are left behind and disconsidered by their Western counterparts, deprived of entry into the most militarized area of the moment.
And yet this does not prevent them from being in line with Israeli propaganda, comfortably installed on Bolloré TV sets and even public service. And don't even talk about Yemen, the organ of the invisibility of war crimes. Foreign journalists are there persona non grata, blocked at borders, when they are simply not executed. Wasn't there any point in finding a fairer balance with the profession? The film would have been much less generic and would have gained in intensity. Moreover, while the profession requires certain courage, it is not dictated by adventurism and the thirst for death. Countercurrent, Civil War presents a field of ruins where the American dream of the impossible interview could still hatch from the still hot ruins of the country, even at the heart of the chaos illustrated by the haunting of a new Civil War.
Alex Garland is content with the strict minimum by repeating to the letter the expression « to shoot » in English which means so much « shooting with a firearm » that « Take a photo ». Journalists draw the plane like soldiers raise their weapons against their opponents. Let's say it's a little light when we draw up the health check of press freedom in the world and we could go on enumeration ad eternam. By choosing to put journalists and soldiers on the same level, Alex Garland makes them mere spectators without an editorial line or compass. The whole is therefore in the end very superficial. Emotional thought for Bernard Henri Lévy on his Israeli tank, yesterday during the operation « Lead hardened », today to abound the military operation « Iron ice ». When he is not in suit in a trench in Syria or taking selfies in Ukraine, this influential philosopher deflates on TV sets on the virtues of « The most moral army in the world » to shape public opinion. What a pity to be deprived of critical scope with Civil War !
The film multiplies the photos and no question will be found. Death is a game, war, a set without rules. As soon as it is necessary to get into the life of the subject of the loss of a colleague, Alex Garland returns with ease. We choke the sounds and voices to let the music speak for itself. Being a journalist is a punk. Basta! We drown grief in drunkenness and we're back for a ride. Hopefully the reflection is killed in the egg for some machine gun images.
Simple witnesses, this is the only very poor teaching of the film for a profession that is otherwise more committed, at the risk of the ideas received, sometimes against the propaganda of the belligerents and at the risk of their lives. In another register, he will be much preferred the excellent The Sweet East who was abusing much better an America deprived of landmarks and who never managed to free himself from the trauma of September 11 or the sad gag of the capitol, a sinister echo of the fantasy of civil war. Civil WarHe's not even a nihilist, he just offers no sincere point of view for a great private show in his soul. Nor is it a film of anticipation, since it is even ironically late over its time. Shouldn't we have chosen a broader objective for a subject that deserved to be looked after?
Checkmate?
Garland, a director to follow anyway? The matter remains open. If Civil War So far, the British director has mastered the effects of staging with a taste for plastic horror. But Garland doesn't seem ready to immediately throw himself into a new project as proved this article d The Guardian or ScreenDaily.
While waiting for his next productions, it will be the Alex Garland screenwriter who will be able to find him at the cinema, including the project already mentioned 28 years later but also the co-realization of Warfare with Ray Mendoza for which no release date is yet announced. Case to follow...
Trailer of Civil War
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