Premiered last night at the South by Southwest film festival, in theaters April 12th.  Though not a high budget movie and not starring any A-listers Civil War is hotly anticipated due to a provocative subject that about half of recently polled Americans fear may come to pass.

The consensus of the first few reviews - for what that's worth - sounds like an 8 or 9 out of 10.  I frequently find my opinion of a movie to be the inverse of pro movie reviewers, but so far everything they're saying sounds good to me.  They report excellent effects that make it look like a much more expensive film, lots of intense street level action reminiscent of director Alex Garland's 28 Days Later, and zero clues as to the politics of the sides, all of which commit war crimes.  The purpose of the film is described as condemning apathy and presenting the worst case scenario for the continued failures of our political system.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/movies/news/civil-war-first-reactions-from-premiere-scary-as-hell-cautionary-tale/ar-BB1jVhro
Screening to a packed audience at Austin's Paramount Theater, Civil War was revealed to be a tribute to war journalism that veers away from explaining the politics that led to its central conflict. The movie instead depicts the practicalities and horrors of a civil war in modern-day America. The first-blush audience reactions (below) are raves, with viewers calling the film a riveting and haunting movie.

The film from acclaimed writer-director Alex Garland (Ex Machina) imagines a near-future dystopia where the United States has been torn apart under the authoritarian rule of a three-term president (Nick Offerman). The story follows a journalist (Kirsten Dunst) and her colleagues as they make their way across a hostile and divided states of America with the hope of interviewing the president. Much of the road trip adventure feels a bit like Garland's breakout 28 Days Later - only with murderous civilian soldiers touting assault rifles lurking around every turn instead of zombies...

When asked about when he wrote the film, Garland said, "It was four years ago. I wrote it back then and sent it to A24 and they just said, 'Yup, all good," which was surprising. This is a brave film to finance, so it was super appreciated." Garland has long been in business with A24, dating back to his directorial debut, Ex Machina. The action film is reportedly the indie studio's biggest swing to date.

Civil War doesn't offer much explanation about how the country gets to its perilous state (audiences do learn that the president disbanded the FBI), which the director said was intentional. Said Garland, "The film is intended to be a conversation. It is not asserting things. You want to leave space for people to bring themselves to the conversation. It's important that it was a two-way street."
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https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/mar/15/civil-war-sxsw-premiere-alex-garland?ref=upstract.com
The actual film, which garnered initial rave reviews from a packed audience at the Paramount Theatre in Austin, ultimately proved to not be as incendiary or controversial as feared.

Civil War offers a warning about the wholly destructive endpoint of polarization, but the story abstains from making direct connections to the current political climate and does not map neatly on to the current US political divide. In this imagining, for example, Texas and California are allies in the "Western Front" encroaching on Washington, where the three-term president, played by Nick Offerman, still has nominal control over some military and the eastern US.

It follows four combat journalists, played by Dunst, Wagner Moura, Cailee Spaeny and Stephen McKinley Henderson, as they travel from New York to the war's frontline in Charlottesville, Virginia, across contested territory.

They observe atrocities and offenses from both sides. The president has abused executive power by authorizing drone strikes against American citizens and disbanding the FBI, but his political party, agenda or ideology stays unspecified. There are no obvious delineations by race, gender or class; characters' allusions to a "real America" remain vague.

Such vagueness is a deliberate attempt to allow viewers to apply their own understanding of polarization to the story, according to Garland.

"The film is intended to be a conversation, so it doesn't assert too much," the Ex Machina and Annihilation film-maker said at Civil War's first Imax screening in Austin.

Referring to not just Americans but citizens of his native England and other countries experiencing hyper-polarization and populism, Garland added: "We don't need it explained. We know exactly why it might happen. We know exactly what the fault lines and pressures are.

"It didn't feel appropriate" to lay out the politics, he said, as he wanted the film, reportedly the most expensive yet produced by the company A24, to allow for "finding points of agreement between everybody".
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https://www.indiewire.com/criticism/movies/civil-war-movie-review-alex-garland-a24-1234964914/
The filmmaking style of Alex Garland's "Civil War" is, in many ways, the negative image of Jonathan Glazer's "The Zone of Interest." Both films deal with dehumanization and desensitization to the suffering of others, but where Jonathan Glazer's film does this with absence and restraint, Garland's assaults the viewer with nauseating intensity. Shaky camerawork enhances the you-are-there feeling of the film's combat scenes, and every gunshot   and there are a lot of them   is mixed loud enough to make your ears ring.

It's like an immersive experience of being in a war zone, which establishes a sort of battlefield camaraderie between the audience and the group of journalists who guide us through the Eastern part of the U.S. in the last days of a devastating civil war. The "Western Forces" of Texas and California and the "Florida Alliance" are closing in on Washington, D.C., and despite the confident tone of his daily radio addresses, the president (Nick Offerman) is expected to surrender any day now. The political dimensions of all of this are never explained, and are frankly irrelevant. It doesn't matter how these states joined together, or why they seceded. What matters is what the ensuing violence has done to Americans as a whole.

In real life, America is growing crueler and more divided by the day, and the social fabric of the country is disintegrating along with its infrastructure. But "Civil War" isn't a plea for empathy, or even civility. It simply follows this trend to its logical end point, which is a country where militiamen with automatic weapons shoot strangers on sight and torture their old high school classmates in the burned-out shells of abandoned car washes. Everyone who isn't directly affected by the violence pretends it isn't happening, in the name of "stay[ing] out" of politics   a stance that the film condemns more strongly than any.
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TLDR, so good or not so good?

this

Seems like that would actually go a long ways toward preventing a civil war.

Jeeze, second paragraph bro.  They're saying 8 or 9 out of 10, "haunting", lots of action, zero politics.

I'm going to wait for The Critical Drinker's review

Consider the point of view of Hollywood Guy.  It's going to look like "Opposite Day", for the rest of us.

Thanks for the review, Mal.  I'll pass on this one.

Why do you guys export your opinions to other people? ugh. so lazy.

The last thread was quite the rorscach thread. People see what they want to see.

Guess we’ll see on April 12th.

The thing is, I suspect that the crowd at SXSW hold views that are polar opposite of ours.

It misses the obvious plot hole. Journalists (Since they are congenitally unable to relate facts without injecting their own left-wing biases) will be the first to get shot.

They would?

I've pointed this out before, but the second reel of Lucifer's Hammer, with Tim Hamner feigning a Press Pass to get through the angry crowd, likely goes a lot differently if done today.

Written by raging libs.  Very doubtful.  What Bizzaro universe has Texas and Florida siding with Kalifornia?

I'm pretty sure these odd bedfellows was deliberate to muddy the politics.  Any "logical" combination would cause the audience to label the sides good or bad.

Is this the Obama movie?

According to the article it was screened in Austin,  so mostly liberal audience liked it.

I remember Bernie Goldberg talking about Dan Rather describing the New York Times as "middle of the road."
"No politics" for the Austin crowd could easily mean, "Well sure, it demonizes conservatives - they're evil. Other than that though, it's not political."
The "3 term President" is the bad guy? Guaranteed he's a Republican. In entertainment, if the POTUS is a good guy, he's a Democrat; a bad guy, he's a Republican.

I just have an extremely hard time imagining any Hollywood film not portraying conservatives as evil.

I can see Texas and Florida with Northern California.
Northern California is not Central or Southern California.

Since they have totally abdicated their responsibility of holding government to account, and instead embraced the mantra of hating the patriarchy of white, male, hetero persons, yes, I believe they would. They were also willing participants in the Russia Collusion hoax, The Covid Conspiracy, and other opinion shaping campaigns large and small.

TLDR.

Let's get fomenting!

Zero politics in a movie about Americans having war with each other?

You'll have to forgive my doubt.

So the usual suspects say it's great??? Sounds like it's a woke-fest POS but I'm sure they'll be plenty on both sides stroking off to it.

Ironically, in the Steve Baker thread, GD said we should have respect for journalists.

Inflection and cadence too irritating to listen to. He needs to just write

Writer also says he wrote it 4 years ago,  about a president who doesn't leave after his term is over,  hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

“What kind of journalist are you”

Certainly the bad guys will all be portrayed as white supremacist MAGA types.

so no politics....  riiiiiight      

Impossible to remain apolitical, you say?

Idiocracy, 1984 and Starship Troopers would like a word with you.

Two sides fight.

Got it?  

I respect people who have earned it. People who are fair-minded and aren't using subterfuge to promote a hidden agenda. 50 anonymous sources agree with me!

 Wait... There's a Lucifer's Hammer movie?  

Kristen Dunce (spelling) and Todd from breaking bad aren’t considered “A listers”?

I'll watch it and form my own opinion.

The film was written four years ago.

If you remember what was happening four years ago its pretty clear who the inspiration was for the POTUS that wouldn't leave thus kicking off the boog.

I expect this will be the brave diverse super intelligent journalists bouncing from place to place stunned at the barbarity of civil war and how dumb everyone else is.

There is a decent chance we get some solid memes out of it though.

No politics. None.

I'll go back to reading this.

Much better depiction of an 2nd American Civil War.
(Avoid the HBO Max TV show.)

I'll wait until April 15th to see what the reviews at TMDB and the IMDb are like.

No politics, yet they have "militiamen" murdering and torturing people on a whim or to settle old greivances.

Militiamen=armed civilians=war crimes.

No politics. Sure.

Dude, its a movie about a civil war. Obviously it would involve politics and all of those bad things.

If they can really pull that off without politics, it might be worth seeing.

While I'll probably watch it too, I'm going to wait and see what you guys think first.

https://www.polygon.com/24099490/civil-war-review-2024


Studios don't generally do high-budget partisan* polemics....because they want as many asses in seats/buys on streaming as possible, so you don't try to alienate half the potential audience out of the gate.

My guess is that it's a "fictional" Civil War, in a parallel reality where the political fracture lines are sufficiently different from Reality-2024 that folks on both the Left and Right can watch the movie and see themselves in the designated protagonists.

I'm going to give it a chance.  Although, TBH, I think this sort of story would be better as a streaming series, For All Mankind-style.




*-yes, that includes the "Woke" shit coming out of Disney, et al.  Those are misfired attempts by out-of-touch producers to tap into what they think the moviegoers want to see.

How dare a movie take inspiration from the real world lmao. Some of you guys are so sensitive...

From the review:

"It's almost perverse how little Civil War reveals about the sides of the central conflict, or the causes or crises that led to war. (Viewers who show up expecting an action movie that confirms their own political biases and demonizes their opponents are going to leave especially confused about what they just watched.) This isn't a story about the causes or strategies of American civil war: It's a personal story about the hows and whys of war journalism"


I'm definitely going to give this a watch.

What?  You hated my three word review?  How about two words then?

They fight!