Civil War
Yeah, a muddled mess, you can’t see the point clearly (maybe there isn’t any). Clearly written during the Trump years, it’s stale before it even plays in theatres. Amazing military visuals and sound, the sonic punch, the tactics, so engrossing.
Say what you want about the tenets of seditious gun nuts, because the film doesn’t. Every goddamn thing is left to the imagination, it’s ethereal and implied on the plot and world-building, but ruthless and gritty on all other senses. Completely apolitical, not even the centrist middle-of-the-road “common sense” bullshit.
I read several reviews depicting the President as a despot, but he is literally a cameo. Maybe he’s like Lincoln, putting down seditious rebels. Or like FDR, with his fourth term. Are they despots? I know they are trying to shoehorn Trump into that, but it makes no sense, there’s nothing here.
I think this is to a Robert Redford film like Stranger Things is to Spielberg: phoney nostalgia for a time that never happened. The kid using a film camera is the height of this, what complete nonsense.
The New York Times reporter sacrifices himself so that other might live. The embedded journalists are led astray, they don’t get the nicer pictures. The Chinese guys are shot on sight, for not being American enough. Does this have any ulterior reason, some kind of hidden meaning? Maybe, maybe not?
And the goddamn “Antifa massacre”, you can’t just drop shit like that. Not a callback, not a radio reference, nothing, just window dressing. All tease, no release.
The actors try to do something, but there’s not that much for them to do. Kirsten Dunst does nothing but mope and be ultra depressed, then when the opportunity arises she gets busy passing the baton to the next generation. Wagner Moura is the extrovert cool guy in a war zone. The younger journalist has a larger range of emotions, but not much of an arc. Kirsten Dunst’s husband has a glorified cameo for the trailer, a speed-bump on their way to DC.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.