Film Civil War (written and directed by Alex Garland) - in theaters on April 12, 2024

Sweet Square said:
.
Joe_Rogan.png
Click to expand...

He respects (and possibly found some common ground with?) a military adviser he worked with when making a film about war. What an idiot!
 
noodlehair said:
Wait people actually thought Annihilation was good?

I can't remember when I watched it but I remember i hadn't heard of it prior and ended up thinking it was one of those awful netflix b movies.
Click to expand...

Amazing isnt it that there are people with opinions that differ from yours.
 
Last edited:
Sweet Square said:
I somewhat get the people from different political backgrounds need to talk to each other argument but….a former Navy seal!
Click to expand...

Isn’t that just saying that we should remember that people with whom you might have a completely different political opinion are still real people, that we might be able to relate to on a human level? Which is fair and kind of important, no?
 
Pogue Mahone said:
There’s no “both sides” stuff in that interview.
Click to expand...
Well he denies there is, sure, but I can't really take the "if we just learned to talk to each other" shtick seriously these days.
 
Hugh Jass said:
Amazing isnt it that there are people with opinions that differ from yours.
Click to expand...

No not really. I just genuinely thought it was an awful netflix movie rather than a supposedly acclaimed pice of film. I have just learned otherwise.

Do you think posting stuff like this makes you smart?
 
Ubik said:
Well he denies there is, sure, but I can't really take the "if we just learned to talk to each other" shtick seriously these days.
Click to expand...

I personally think it’s more important these days than ever before but let’s put that aside for a moment. The context here is a bloke who’s just made a movie about a radically politically divided America. So his movie is obviously going to be more interesting if he tries to look for the human stories behind the conflict (and yes, those stories will be happening on “both sides”!) rather than portraying the opposing forces as paper thin stereotypes of good and evil. So you can see where he’s coming from, surely?
 
Pogue Mahone said:
I personally think it’s more important these days than ever before but let’s put that aside for a moment. The context here is a bloke who’s just made a movie about a radically politically divided America. So his movie is obviously going to be more interesting if he tries to look for the human stories behind the conflict (and yes, those stories will be happening on “both sides”!) rather than portraying the opposing forces as paper thin stereotypes of good and evil. So you can see where he’s coming from, surely?
Click to expand...
It's just the dissonance between that "radically politically divided America" bit and this:

In Civil War’s version of the near future, the entrenched Democrat state of California and the entrenched Republican state of Texas are aligned as the “Western Forces” against the federal government, though neither they, nor the federal army, evince any distinguishing political ideology.
Click to expand...

It makes it feel quite trivial. If it's just a fantasy tale then okay, but feels very flimsy if we're trying to have it mean something right now. Anyway, I liked Ex Machina enough that I'm sure I'll watch this eventually, just not hugely enthused is all.
 
Pogue Mahone said:
Isn’t that just saying that we should remember that people with whom you might have a completely different political opinion are still real people, that we might be able to relate to on a human level? Which is fair and kind of important, no?
Click to expand...
If it was an average conservative then yeah ok I guess. But the example Garland uses is someone who joined the most political institution in society(In this case a very elite military group). The person job was to killed others for political reasons.

It looking more and more likely Garland annoyance is really about people having political opinions. Although tbh this is why I’m interested in seeing the film. A man who doesn’t believe in politics or know anything about America has made a film about a modern day civil war.
 
Sweet Square said:
It looking more and more likely Garland annoyance is really about people having political opinions. Although tbh this is why I’m interested in seeing the film. A man who doesn’t believe in politics or know anything about America has made a film about a modern day civil war.
Click to expand...

That’s how you interpret an interview in which he says this?

He began work on Civil War around 2018, observing the world and “feeling surprised that there wasn’t more civil disobedience” going on. Since those years saw protests over a range of issues – pro-Trump, anti-Trump, gun control, climate change and Brexit to name a few – I ask what, specifically, he was surprised that people weren’t marching in the streets about. This provokes a look of ferocious incredulity. “Is that a real question? I mean are you kidding? There were a holistic set of problems, globally. Not least in the country where I live [UK], or in the country I’ve been working [US]. There’s a lot to be very concerned about.”
Click to expand...

It feels like you’ve made your mind up that the bloke is some sort of Lib Dem centrist dad and you won’t let anything that he actually says change your mind about this. Now I’m conscious I could be defending a total berk, as I don’t know much about him as a person but the evidence in this thread used as character assassination is flimsy as feck.
 
Last edited:
That trailer makes the film look uninteresting to me. As a native Californian, I can assure you there is no way California and Texas are teaming up. It's more unlikely than Batman and the Joker teaming up. There are Americans who apparently fantasize about going to war against other Americans. These are the ones who stockpile weapons. They say there are 3 or 4 guns in American for every American, but it's actually more like half the country owns 8 guns apiece. I have family members in Georgia who say things (on Facebook) like, "If this is how the liberals mistreat us now, imagine how they will mistreat us after they've taken our guns." It's bizarre.
 
Pogue Mahone said:
That’s how you interpret an interview in which he says this?
Click to expand...
But he never says what the issues are, right ? The interviewer asks him specifically what should people be angry about then he gets annoyed and starts talking about how nice the navy seal guy was.

Pogue Mahone said:
It feels like you’ve made your mind up that the bloke is some sort of Lib Dem centrist dad and you won’t let anything that he actually says change your mind about this.
Click to expand...
I feel like he is more of a Joe Rogan type than anything else. “There were a holistic set of problems, globally.” is just meaningless rubbish.

Garland himself says his role is pretty much a middle manager. He is going to see the world as merely a set of different opinions that could if directed correctly work together. Imo that’s a dumb way to look at the world. But you never know could make for a interesting” viewing experience in a film.


Pogue Mahone said:
Now I’m conscious I could be defending a total berk, as I don’t know much about him as a person but the evidence in this thread used as character assassination is flimsy as feck.
Click to expand...
Most likely a nice guy and I like his film Annihilation but if he’s going to make a political about a future American civil war then he should at least have some political ideas. Also I like hating things. It’s fun.
 
I had hoped for this to be a big budget spectacle but it seems that won't be the case.
 
VorZakone said:
I had hoped for this to be a big budget spectacle but it seems that won't be the case.
Click to expand...

$50M is not exactly what I call as big budget anyway. Alex Garland himself said that it is a road trip movie with a kind of societal collapse in the background, which bears similar themes with what he wrote for 28 Days Later.
 
Wing Attack Plan R said:
That trailer makes the film look uninteresting to me. As a native Californian, I can assure you there is no way California and Texas are teaming up. It's more unlikely than Batman and the Joker teaming up. There are Americans who apparently fantasize about going to war against other Americans. These are the ones who stockpile weapons. They say there are 3 or 4 guns in American for every American, but it's actually more like half the country owns 8 guns apiece. I have family members in Georgia who say things (on Facebook) like, "If this is how the liberals mistreat us now, imagine how they will mistreat us after they've taken our guns." It's bizarre.
Click to expand...

I think he teamed up Cali and Texas on purpose, to not make it seem too much like real politics. Otherwise you would get claims of propaganda from right wing folks in all likelihood.
 
sport2793 said:
I think he teamed up Cali and Texas on purpose, to not make it seem too much like real politics. Otherwise you would get claims of propaganda from right wing folks in all likelihood.
Click to expand...
So it's a movie about fake politics and it's not even going to explain what those fake politics are?

I remember seeing a trailer for this before I watched Dune 2 and thinking this was peak capitalism; of course someone in America was going to try and monetise the fact it's on the brink of civil war. The directors comments I've seen in this thread just reinforce that view.

I don't see how you can make a film about polarisation and political divisiveness without it commenting on why that divisiveness even exists. I'll still watch it though
 
sport2793 said:
I think he teamed up Cali and Texas on purpose, to not make it seem too much like real politics. Otherwise you would get claims of propaganda from right wing folks in all likelihood.
Click to expand...

I’ve read one review of the film and the reviewer gave the impression that the Texas California alliance isn’t as strange as it seems.

But the actual movie turns out to be more politically astute and plausible than early reactions said, even though it's likely that Garland's "you already know the story" approach (like the way the overall arc of the US occupation of Vietnam was depicted in "Full Metal Jacket") will seem to validate the gripes for the first hour. Yes, it's true, Texas votes Republican in national elections and California votes Democratic, but as of this writing, Northern California is increasingly controlled by libertarian-influenced tech billionaires, and much of central and eastern California leans Republican and loathes California Democrats so much that they've advocated "divid(ing) parts of coastal California, including the Bay Area, from Californiato become an independent country."
Click to expand...
 
sport2793 said:
I think he teamed up Cali and Texas on purpose, to not make it seem too much like real politics. Otherwise you would get claims of propaganda from right wing folks in all likelihood.
Click to expand...

Yes, it's a shrewd choice if you want to cover a topic without getting drawn into the 2024 culture war. Pair up Cali and Texas (representing two different poles of anti-authoritarianism) against a fictional authoritarian in Washington, and its clear this is a just an alternate history tale. There is a rather large sub-genre of alternate reality fiction books that rely on a premise that isn't exactly realistic in the world we live but require accepting an alternative where things evolved different in some butterfly effect way. Nothing wrong with that imo. That might not appeal to some people but I think it's likely that it makes for a better movie than if this was just some anti-Trump film with very predictable story beats.
 
VorZakone said:
I had hoped for this to be a big budget spectacle but it seems that won't be the case.
Click to expand...
I had a feeling, at some point, someday he'll go full hollywood, and looks like it's just not his thing. Even in Sunshine or Dredd which meant to be explosive gore galore, still went for contained story, focused not to much on scale.

This one will probably be about war journalism, and what they endure during it, human aspect of it etc.

Now there's a 28 Years Later in the making, he's writing it with Danny Boyle, so perhaps this one could pack some spectacle.
 
Van Piorsing said:
I had a feeling, at some point, someday he'll go full hollywood, and looks like it's just not his thing. Even in Sunshine or Dredd which meant to be explosive gore galore, still went for contained story, focused not to much on scale.

This one will probably be about war journalism, and what they endure during it, human aspect of it etc.

Now there's a 28 Years Later in the making, he's writing it with Danny Boyle, so perhaps this one could pack some spectacle.
Click to expand...
Someone mentioned it'll be a road trip kind of movie. Which isn't bad, don't get me wrong.

But a civil war movie? Give me explosions and spectacle, baby.
 
VorZakone said:
Someone mentioned it'll be a road trip kind of movie. Which isn't bad, don't get me wrong.

But a civil war movie? Give me explosions and spectacle, baby.
Click to expand...
Perhaps if near 2001 his script for Halo movie was executed by Steven Spielberg, we could have Alex Garland now, as the new George Lucas.

Still i'd love to see A24 rebooting Rambo just for giggles.
 
I’m interested in this movie. 28 Days Later was somewhat a road trip movie too. I’m hoping for some unsettling moments in it like how American civilisation has degenerated and become more savage.
 
Really looking forward to this. Haven't liked all things Garland has done, but even when he doesn't hit it's well made and at least brings something to the table (didn't really like either Devs or Men, but there's definitely something there, especially Devs has a great core story and falters mostly in the writing). Seems like a good IMAX film as well.
 
I give it 8/10. I really enjoyed it in an uncomfortable way. It left me thinking of all the things it left out, long after the movie was over.

This is not an action movie, the trailers really are clickbait, promising the audience a movie they simply won’t get. It’s effectively a road movie following 4 reporters of different ages through a war torn USA. During the movie I kept waiting for the action to kick off which left me dissapointed. But as I settled into the movie and recalibrated my expectations, I got absorbed in the kind of unsettling way 28 days later (another Garland story) equally was able to do. Its the foreboding feeling Garland does well, you just know something horrible is coming but you don’t know how it will happen.

Without giving anything away, I think some of the criticisms , particularly about how the movie doesn’t look to show bias in any side, is actually one of its strengths.

I feel people want to hear what the movie has to say (maybe about Trump or woke etc) but that’s just part of the problem of society that the film is pointing out by not addesssing. It’s like people in football forum only wanting to hear and agree with those who want ETH sacked or vice Versa. People want to know what side the filmmaker is coming down on because they want to know if he’s on their side, whcuh is exactly part of the reason people don’t listen to each other, they only listen to “their side”.

By not having a side, the message can be kept simple. War is horrible, there really is no need for it, certainly for a country like usa and nobody wins when we can’t even sort out our differences in a civil manner (instead of civil war). We don’t know how the war started in Civil War although one can engage in some thought experiments and imagine what horrible turn of events led us here.

I felt this was another strength of the movie. I’d say it would be a great movie to see how we got to where the movie starts but in many ways it’s more unsettling imagining how it might of happened, particularly as there is a certain potential American presidential candidate who has all the hallmarks of a dictator in waiting.

I found the movie unsettling on many levels. Probably moreso because USA is meant to be the beacon of Democracy to the world. To see it ravaged by civil war makes me wonder how countries in our kneck of the woods have adapted but I don’t want to see that movie, that’s way to close to home for me…
 
Last edited:
Just come back from the cinema, bloody hell that was a great film!

Lots of points to put in spoilers but I loved the apolitical nature of the film. You see / hear some of the actions that lead to the Civil War, but that’s not the story he’s wanting to tell, and that is about what an actual Civil War in the US today would look like, and how people would react.

Not much of a spoiler but I’ll blank it off anyway, but the ambiguity of the ANTIFA massacre, was it a massacre of ANTIFA or by ANTIFA was great.

The different realities of how people would react was chilling, with:
  • those outright fighting their oppressors
  • those who would string up people they used to know / be friends with. Neighbour vs neighbour coming to mind
  • those, like the INSANE Jesse Plemons, who’ll turn ultra-nationalist against anyone not their creed / colour / faith / sexuality
Then the discussions about the role of journalists / journalism was really good. The notion of being part of history but also having to separate yourself from where you are and remove your humanity was also very powerful.

An excellent, if (very) difficult at times to watch, movie.
 
Watched it over the weekend. It was decent enough but it felt like it lacked something to it… a common theme with Garland directed films.

The apolitical nature and ambiguity of it was a strong point. I wish there was more focus on the world of what the U.S would be like in that situation. I actually thought the main characters and their war journalism theme not that interesting in comparison to that. The ending was somewhat abrupt and felt like there could have been a closing scene after it before the credits rolled.

I liked that the Western Force ‘rebels’ didn’t fall into that protagonist trope like they easily could have, and actually portrays them as pretty extremist and cold blooded towards their enemies. I’m glad that it was portrayed that there’s no ‘evil empire and good guy rebels’ and you can theorise that all the sides are fecking crazy lunatics, and the losers in it are the poor souls caught in the middle of it all, who are the closest thing to protagonists in this world

This would be make a great 7-8 hour miniseries, with more of the roadtripping through the chaos in between.
 
Last edited:
It’s a really solid movie about war photography and how people become desensitised to the horror of war that contains one incredible scene. I get why he wanted it to take place in the US - I get the message is don’t let this happen
(whilst the President is unsympathetic I don’t think the message is overthrowing him was worth it - it’s totally ambiguous - and actually all the horrific shit is done by the Western Alliance…)
- but I’d really like a nuanced film about how and why an American civil war might occur in the near future - there’s definitely a cracking film or tv show to be made there that would be pertinent to our times. This quite deliberately isn’t that film though and never had any intention of being that film.
 
Mickeza said:
(whilst the President is unsympathetic I don’t think the message is overthrowing him was worth it - it’s totally ambiguous - and actually all the horrific shit is done by the Western Alliance…)
Click to expand...
How do you know this? The only crimes you can see committed by them were executing surrendering white house staff at the final siege towards the end. Throughout the rest of the movie it wasn't abundantly clear which side everyone was on. There's also an interesting distinction regarding treatment of journalists - IIRC the insinuation was that loyalist troops would shoot all journalists on site but it seemed like the WF were happy to have embedded journalists follow them around.
 
It was brilliant, bleak, grim and made near zero sense. Assault on the senses and I thought the level of violence and the realism was tough to watch.
 
Kaos said:
How do you know this? The only crimes you can see committed by them were executing surrendering white house staff at the final siege towards the end. Throughout the rest of the movie it wasn't abundantly clear which side everyone was on. There's also an interesting distinction regarding treatment of journalists - IIRC the insinuation was that loyalist troops would shoot all journalists on site but it seemed like the WF were happy to have embedded journalists follow them around.
Click to expand...

One of my theories was that the WF were happy to have journalists was the ulterior motive to manipulate them into being propaganda merchants, which by the end of the movie, the 2 surviving journalists feel like that as they are accomplices in executing someone in cold blood like savages, and the two experienced journalists in Dunst and Henderson who died seemed like the closest thing to actual, objective journalism. They went to do an interview with someone and the ones who survived ended up being their judge, jury and executioner, going to show in this world that impartial journalism is dead, both in the figurative sense and literal sense with Dunst and Henderson dying.
 
Kaos said:
How do you know this? The only crimes you can see committed by them were executing surrendering white house staff at the final siege towards the end. Throughout the rest of the movie it wasn't abundantly clear which side everyone was on. There's also an interesting distinction regarding treatment of journalists - IIRC the insinuation was that loyalist troops would shoot all journalists on site but it seemed like the WF were happy to have embedded journalists follow them around.
Click to expand...
Good point about the murdering of journalists - but the scene where they take over the building has the western alliance murdering POWs at the end in pretty horrific fashion - and it is stated that the Jesse Plemons character isn’t Government forces - though ambiguous what he actually is. Literally the only things we find out about the US Government is the first minute when Swanson is doing his Trump impression, that journalists will be killed in Washington and the bit on the radio about the third term. The vibe I got from the last scene in the White House was not one where you were supposed to be supportive of what was happening on screen - it was very grim.
 
Mickeza said:
Good point about the murdering of journalists - but the scene where they take over the building has the western alliance murdering POWs at the end in pretty horrific fashion - and it is stated that the Jesse Plemons character isn’t Government forces - though ambiguous what he actually is. Literally the only things we find out about the US Government is the first minute when Swanson is doing his Trump impression, that journalists will be killed in Washington and the bit on the radio about the third term. The vibe I got from the last scene in the White House was not one where you were supposed to be supportive of what was happening on screen - it was very grim.
Click to expand...
I think the key thing to note was this wasn't just a war between two sides. There were other factions beyond the WF and Loyalists. We know there's also a Florida led alliance of States in the South East, and various militias operating independently, with some towns just looking to defend themselves from the outside world, irrespective of allegiance. A telling example was the sniper scene where those two blokes claimed they had no idea who the sniper bunkered up in the house was, but all they knew was they had to kill him before he killed them. My take on the Jesse Plemons character was he wasn't necessarily affiliated with either the government or WF, but rather an ultranationalist bigot who took advantage of the nationwide anarchy, picked up a rifle and along with his bigoted mates decided to just go on a murderous ideological killing spree, killing anyone they didn't deem 'American' enough. He just looked like your usual bigoted American nationalist gun-toter with his crude camo attire, and no distinct military insignia to identify his allegiance.
 
Chairman Steve said:
One of my theories was that the WF were happy to have journalists was the ulterior motive to manipulate them into being propaganda merchants, which by the end of the movie, the 2 surviving journalists feel like that as they are accomplices in executing someone in cold blood like savages, and the two experienced journalists in Dunst and Henderson who died seemed like the closest thing to actual, objective journalism. They went to do an interview with someone and the ones who survived ended up being their judge, jury and executioner, going to show in this world that impartial journalism is dead, both in the figurative sense and literal sense with Dunst and Henderson dying.
Click to expand...
Its a fair point, but I feel like the government could have missed a trick by also making use of journalists for their own propaganda purposes. Would have been easy to have also had them on board to selectively relay the message as to how awful the WF were, with plenty of WF atrocities to use as examples of the enemy's heinous nature. But again its possible they already had a propaganda division of their own with their own state-sponsored journalists, essentially Douglas Murray types to convey a one-sided message.
 
Kaos said:
I think the key thing to note was this wasn't just a war between two sides. There were other factions beyond the WF and Loyalists. We know there's also a Florida led alliance of States in the South East, and various militias operating independently, with some towns just looking to defend themselves from the outside world, irrespective of allegiance. A telling example was the sniper scene where those two blokes claimed they had no idea who the sniper bunkered up in the house was, but all they knew was they had to kill him before he killed them. My take on the Jesse Plemons character was he wasn't necessarily affiliated with either the government or WF, but rather an ultranationalist bigot who took advantage of the nationwide anarchy, picked up a rifle and along with his bigoted mates decided to just go on a murderous ideological killing spree, killing anyone they didn't deem 'American' enough. He just looked like your usual bigoted American nationalist gun-toter with his crude camo attire, and no distinct military insignia to identify his allegiance.
Click to expand...
I get all that - but the picture being painted is still one of the factions fighting the Government forces doing very bad shit - far worse than anything you actually witness from the Government forces themselves. There’s even a line that says once they overthrow the White House they’ll all start fighting each other. So is the message that if a despot dictator decides to stay in power/steal elections we should just do nothing because it ain’t worth it and hey look at how nice this clothes shop is? Is the message don’t elect tyrannical twats because this is ultimately how it ends up? Or is the message - as I suspect - that there is no message? It’s a completely apolitical movie about a modern civil war breaking out in America that never even attempts to look at what could cause that to happen or the fact it’s a path America could be heading down. Which is fine - that isn’t this movie but it’d be awesome if it was someone’s movie because that movie sounds super interesting to me.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.