Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura, and Cailee Spaeny journey through an American torn apart in Alex Garland's ambitious film, that has divided opinion - but maybe not for the reasons you'd expect.
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00:00 This video is sponsored by Entertainment Earth.
00:02 Hello and welcome to Projector, and on this episode, Kirsten Dunst,
00:06 Wagner Mora, and Kayleigh Spainier are on the front line of an American Civil War.
00:12 [music]
00:28 In the near future, America is under the rule of a fascist president, played by Nick Offerman,
00:33 who is at civil war with the Western forces, a collection of secessionist states fighting to
00:38 restore democracy. Photojournalist Lee, played by Kirsten Dunst, and journalist Joel, played by
00:43 Wagner Mora, believe the president will soon be overthrown, and set out to drive to Washington,
00:48 D.C. with the intention of interviewing the president before he's defeated.
00:52 They're joined by veteran journalist Sammy, played by Stephen McKinley Henderson,
00:56 and young photographer Jesse, played by Kayleigh Spainier, as they journey closer and closer to the
01:01 front lines of the conflict. Civil War is the latest from writer/director Alex Garland, whose
01:06 work I've liked quite a bit in the past. As a writer, he's frequently collaborated with Danny
01:11 Boyle on the likes of 28 Days Later and Sunshine. I've always felt like Sunshine was two-thirds of
01:16 a great movie, and then it goes a bit off track in the final third where it suddenly turns into
01:21 a slasher. But I really liked his Dread reboot that he wrote, and rumor has it he was quite
01:27 influential on the post-production of. As a director, I was blown away by his debut feature
01:33 Ex Machina. That was one of my favourite films of that year, and it still holds up. It still feels
01:39 very eerily Prussian, especially with the AI debate that's going on right now. I think that's still
01:46 Garland's best feature, but I do have to add a bit of a caveat to that because I still haven't
01:51 caught up with Annihilation yet, owing to the fact that it wasn't theatrically released over here,
01:57 which is very unfortunate. But I did go and see Men, and while I like the concept of it and some
02:03 of the elements, it felt like it got tangled up in its own body horror towards the end of it and got
02:08 very muddled. Garland's films tend to be quite divisive and polarising with audiences, and I
02:14 think that's because they're as much about what the audience brings to the films as what the films
02:19 say to the audience, and I think that very much influences how they're perceived and how they're
02:25 taken away by so many of them. It's understandable why Civil War has been so polarising in its
02:33 response. In fact, it's rather fitting for a film with this particular ilk, but not for the reasons
02:38 that you'd necessarily suspect, given the subject matter. What I don't think has helped with that is
02:44 the marketing. This is the biggest budget A24 film to date, and what they've done is they've
02:48 marketed it like it's a big budget action blockbuster, especially in the later promotions,
02:54 which really focus on the gunplay and the military elements, playing to an "Oo-rah" crowd, and that's
03:00 not what the film is in the slightest. Those are peripheral elements at best, and really,
03:06 the film is at its heart a road movie. It's not really an action film per se, and I think that
03:14 that is giving people a completely different expectation of what it really is to begin with
03:19 that definitely isn't helping a film that was already probably going to split audiences right
03:25 down the middle. But I think we should also learn the lesson - never, ever trust an A24 marketing
03:30 campaign. They have literally made misleading trailers a part of their MO. They are trying
03:37 to sneak arthouse films by presenting them in the most mainstream manner possible,
03:42 and making a movie like this look like it was directed by Michael Bay might be some of their
03:47 finest trolling yet. But it is astonishing just how devoid the discourse has become about civil
03:54 war, and the one thing that kept coming up over and over again online was that it was apolitical,
04:00 or politically neutral, which is a charism I don't agree with in the slightest. For a start,
04:07 because you literally cannot be apolitical with a story like this. You literally cannot make a movie
04:14 about a civil war and not have politics in it in some way, even if you were trying to avoid it.
04:20 But also because I literally don't think that's the right word. Maybe "impartial" was the word
04:26 they were looking for, but I don't think I agree with that as a way to describe the movie either,
04:31 because it's not impartial and it's not apolitical. In fact, the movie literally comments on the
04:36 fallacy of being apolitical at several points. The characters mention how they have relatives that
04:43 just trying to pretend like this isn't all happening. They're just lying low on their
04:48 farms, essentially relying on the privilege of not having to be directly involved in this
04:55 on a day-to-day basis. But there's also the sequence where they drive into a small town,
05:00 and they're disconcerted by the fact that everything feels normal, or at least the way
05:04 they remember normal feeling. And that's especially disconcerting for the audience as well, because
05:09 everything we've seen of America up until this point has been disrupted. There are bodies strewn
05:15 on the ground, explosions, bombs, power cuts, people displaced, everything feels like it's
05:21 falling apart. And then suddenly it's quiet. Too quiet. They wander into a shop, and the shopkeeper
05:29 just says "oh, we just don't try to pay attention to what's on the news". But then they wander
05:34 outside and look up and realise that there are snipers pointed on the building looking out for
05:40 trouble. And the underlying point is fairly clear. There is no such thing as being apolitical,
05:46 and the privilege of being so-called apolitical is usually backed up by violence that is just
05:54 casually out of people's eyesight, that they just choose not to look at. It's not a particularly
06:00 subtle metaphor, but it's a pretty clear point about warfare. But I can also understand the
06:06 criticism to a certain extent, because there are certain details in the film's setup that don't
06:10 entirely hold up to Scrucey. The one thing that raised a lot of eyebrows, even back in the trailers,
06:15 was the fact that the Western forces are led by a coalition of the Red State of Texas and the Blue
06:20 State of California in a somewhat unlikely political union. And I'm sure that didn't escape
06:26 the notice of even the British, Alex Garland. I do think that is a somewhat deliberate choice
06:31 on his part. I do think that that is an actual point in those critics' favour. And I think that
06:38 Garland didn't necessarily want this to be red versus blue, but I do think there is a sizable
06:44 amount of the audience that do want it to be about that, especially because there is no escaping the
06:49 fact that this is a movie being released in an election year, so it already feels a bit testy
06:54 and a little bit kind of tense to begin with. So I think that is what people expected the movie to
07:01 be, and instead I don't think it is necessarily about that, or at least not on a kind of just
07:07 very, very broad binary. I think people want it to be explicitly commenting on this specific moment
07:15 right now, and they want the characters to almost be talking right down the barrel of the lens,
07:20 literally telling the audience exactly what the film is trying to say. I just don't think that
07:26 Garland is interested in that particularly. But while Civil War isn't directly about right here,
07:33 right now, in 2024, it is undoubtedly influenced by our political moment. A movie like Civil War,
07:40 which was written in 2020 and 2021, would not exist without things like the Trump presidency
07:47 or January 6th. Those were undoubtedly influential on the creative process of the movie, and it plays
07:54 upon those fears. It plays upon those contemporary concerns and our fear that it could actually get
08:01 even worse than that. Nick Offerman's fascist president might not necessarily be a one-to-one
08:06 Trump analogue, but the fact that he's introduced reciting a speech talking about a glorious
08:11 victory that is patently a lie, you know, it's not very subtle to guess who that might be
08:19 specifically based upon. The fact that he's so distrusting of journalists that they're treated
08:24 like "enemy combatants in Washington". The fact that we have characters that are committing
08:32 genocides and exterminating people that are explicitly non-Americans, in the case of the
08:38 Jesse Plemons scene. A movie that has that scene in it cannot be by nature apolitical. That is an
08:45 extremely political scene in the movie, and I didn't sit there watching that moment going "hmm,
08:51 I wonder if this is kind of both sides. I can't tell which side that person is on." Pretty obvious
08:59 which side the Jesse Plemons character comes from and who he might have been inspired by in terms of
09:06 his rhetoric and personality. The film's politics are undoubtedly painted with a fairly broad brush,
09:11 and you don't have to agree with them or its commentary, and there probably is room for
09:15 something more incisive in terms of its politics, but to say that it's apolitical or that it's
09:21 absent entirely is at best overly dismissive and at worst just plain straight disingenuous in my
09:28 opinion. But the reason why Garland hasn't focused on that or the whys and hows of this particular
09:33 scenario is that it's beside the point that he's trying to make. Garland has said that he wanted
09:38 to make an anti-war movie in the vein of "Come and See" or "Apocalypse Now" to cite his own examples,
09:44 but also saying that anti-war movies are often flawed because despite the filmmakers' attempts
09:49 to show the horrors of warfare, it still has a kind of seductive appeal. And a great example of
09:55 this is that scene in "Jarhead" where the marines sit down and they're watching "Apocalypse Now"
10:01 and cheering on the action, and there is itself an irony in the fact that "Jarhead", an anti-war
10:07 movie, went on to spawn a direct-to-video action series that is basically recruitment propaganda,
10:13 as if to prove the point. There is a misconception in many western countries that war does not happen
10:20 here anymore. It couldn't happen. War is something that happens in other places far away, places like
10:28 Ukraine, for example. And instead, Garland forces us to engage with it by placing it right in the
10:36 heart of America and disrupting normalcy. Some of the most potent and striking images are just
10:42 the usual American scenes disrupted by warfare. You think of things like a JCPenney parking lot
10:50 that has a fallen helicopter in the middle of it. It forces the audience to engage with it because
10:57 suddenly it's right where they live. And that's what's so chilling about it because actually,
11:04 by doing that, it feels very uneasily plausible. And that is why so much of the movie is genuinely
11:11 as intense as it is. What Garland gets right with his filmmaking is that there's a real immediacy
11:17 to it. It puts you right smack down on ground level, and it feels absolutely terrifying to be
11:23 in the midst of bullets flying everywhere, especially when you're watching the film in
11:28 the IMAX presentation like I did. Now, I don't usually bring ear protection to the cinema,
11:34 but knowing my IMAX's stupidly loud sound system, I felt it was a wise precaution, and I'm glad I
11:40 did because Civil War is really loud. Like, the explosions felt loud while I was wearing earplugs
11:48 that knock down the volume about 10 decibels. Like, the shots firing over your shoulder,
11:54 they are loud, they are deliberately meant to jolt you, and they are meant to make you feel
12:00 disorientated. And it is chilling stuff. It puts you in the mindset of the characters that are
12:06 having to run and try and survive as best they can. But of course, if we're talking about tension,
12:12 we have to talk about the Jesse Plemons scene, which is literally going to be only referred to
12:18 as the Jesse Plemons scene from this point forward, because god damn, he just walks on for,
12:25 what, seven minutes of screen time? That is probably some of the most squeaky bum seven
12:31 minutes of cinema I've seen in a very long time. Genuinely, an absolutely horrific sequence,
12:40 and Plemons is so absolutely dominating in that screen time. There's a reason why he's
12:46 been such a prominent part of the marketing campaign, even though he is in the movie for
12:51 such a brief moment. But he makes such an indelible impression, largely because he plays
12:57 this character in a terrifyingly understated way. He is genuinely, absolutely fantastic in the movie.
13:05 He just walks in and steals the whole damn thing. And in fact, the only thing that really knocks
13:12 down that sequence is that Garland as a writer decides to add two extra characters directly
13:19 beforehand that you can clearly tell are going to get killed off in this sequence, because that
13:25 seems a little bit overly transparent, to say the least. At least, if you're going to do that,
13:31 introduce the characters earlier so it's not super obvious to the audience.
13:36 But it's also worth noting that what Civil War is doing is not necessarily new. All the way back to
13:40 the 80s, Red Dawn brought the battle to America's doorstep, in that case, Cold War anxieties, and
13:47 even more schlockily, Invasion USA. More recently, though, the point of comparison I was thinking of
13:55 while watching Civil War, but weirdly very few critics seem to have brought up in their reviews,
13:59 is the Purge franchise. I was far more thinking of that than I was any of Garland's examples,
14:06 and certainly the Purge films have similarly uncomfortably tense moments, and certainly
14:12 touch on hot political topics, and have far more overt satire and commentary than Civil War allows
14:19 itself to have. I feel like Civil War does tread on a lot of the ground that the Purge movies have
14:25 done previously. It's just that in this case, it's presented in a more respectable, elevated
14:31 package. Which is not to undermine the effectiveness of it, Civil War is mighty good at what it does,
14:38 it's just that the Purge movies have also tread down this road before, and arguably
14:45 might even be more incisive depending on the viewer. But Civil War also sets itself apart
14:50 from those examples because it's also concerned with the emotional toll living through, and more
14:55 crucially, observing these events takes on a person, and photography is a major part of the
15:00 movie to this end. Kirsten Dunst's Lee, named after Lee Mur, the World War 2 photographer,
15:06 which is rather clumsily mentioned in the dialogue, is clearly heavily traumatized from her
15:10 time in war zones. There's a moment early on where she goes back to her hotel room, and she cries in
15:17 the bathtub. It's a rare moment of emotional vulnerability for the character that often is
15:23 quite defensive a lot of the time. Dunst is not afraid to make the character quite prickly because
15:30 she has to be cold and detached, because she's trying to repress that trauma, otherwise she's
15:36 not going to function on a day-to-day basis. She's burnt out and exhausted and world weary,
15:43 but she has a job to do and she keeps on doing it. Meanwhile you have Vagnum War's journalist Joe,
15:49 who on the contrary actually seems like he's something of an adrenaline junkie, and this
15:54 seems to be something that pops up several times over the course of the movie. The other journalists
15:58 that we meet, several of them seem quite adrenaline junkie-like as well, especially the way that they
16:03 jump between moving vehicles. There is a sense that Joe almost wants to get to the front of the
16:10 battle. He likes to be in the midst of the gunfire and kind of gets off on the danger of it all,
16:16 but even then, later in the movie, he does start to become affected by what he sees. He starts to see
16:23 the real horror of it and it starts to impact him personally, and he realises that it's more
16:29 than just simply thrills. And Stephen McKinley Henderson is fantastic as the veteran reporter
16:36 Sammy. He's someone that everyone respects and adores, but he also should have got out of the
16:41 game years ago, especially because as several characters point out, he's too old and he can't
16:47 run, and that makes him a liability, especially when they're in the midst of danger. But Henderson
16:53 brings such a fatherly warmth to this character. He's someone that has so much wise advice for the
17:00 characters and always seems to be looking out for them, and there's a really fatherly quality to him,
17:06 especially in his dynamic with Lee. He's a character that you feel like you're adoring in
17:12 the same way that the actual characters are on screen, and Henderson makes that role his own.
17:19 But most of the film really belongs to Kayleigh Spaney as Jessie. She very much impressed me
17:25 in this movie, even more so than something like Priscilla, which was actually filmed after Civil
17:30 War despite being released first. She really is the heart of the movie in many ways, and certainly
17:36 the character that gets the most dramatic evolution over the course of it, and it's a
17:41 difficult role, not least of which because the character can be somewhat frustrating in the way
17:46 that she's written at times because she's so impulsive. But Spaney is riveting in this movie.
17:53 She starts out as being this massive fan of Lee and just kind of tags along despite Lee's protest
18:00 because she sees a lot of herself in Jessie, and she knows where this path leads. She knows what
18:07 she's going to experience and the horrors that she's about to witness. She doesn't necessarily
18:12 want to put that on Jessie, but Jessie refuses to give up, and there are moments early on where
18:19 Jessie is completely inexperienced and also not prepared for what she's about to see. There's a
18:26 moment where she sees two men strung up, bloodied and beaten, and obviously close to being executed,
18:34 and she's absolutely in horror. But she also admires herself because she was so stunned
18:39 she didn't take a photo. She didn't have something to take away from the horror of that experience.
18:45 It was Lee that took a photo in that scene. It's a mistake that Jessie won't repeat again. There
18:52 are several moments later on over the course of the movie where we see the POV of Lee and Jessie's
18:59 cameras, and Jessie in particular becomes especially adept at getting the shot at the moment
19:06 of death. Jessie becomes more detached over the course of the movie, the kind of thing that Lee
19:13 warned her about in the first place, but there is that passing of the guard over the course of the
19:18 movie because Lee is realizing that she can't deal with her job any longer. But Jessie also feels
19:27 somewhat eager to be in the heart of battle, and so there is that changing of the guard in terms of
19:33 their relationship, and that makes the dynamic between the two characters interesting because
19:38 Lee does start to become more of a mental figure as the film progresses. But I feel like Civil War
19:45 is better at the journey than it is the destination. The final stretch of the movie, where they're in
19:50 Washington DC at the moment the Western forces arrive trying to take down the White House,
19:55 it feels like a typical war movie. Explosions, gunfire, soldiers grunting, helicopters flying
20:03 overhead. It feels like Gahand is struggling to make this the anti-war movie that he claims it to
20:09 be because it falls into that kind of sensationalism. It feels like the final bit of Zero Dark Thirty
20:16 transplanted to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. But perhaps the bigger issue with the final portion
20:22 of the movie is I feel it's dramatically rushed. There are things the movie has clearly been setting
20:27 up throughout its entire running time. The problem is that when that moment happens, it occurs so
20:34 quickly and feels really inorganic. It relies on characters acting very stupidly in this particular
20:42 instance, and I feel like it doesn't land with the emotional weight it really should, especially
20:48 because it doesn't linger on it. It feels like it happens so quickly and then the movie barely
20:54 leaves you any time to actually process that it's happened in the first place. And then we get into
20:58 the final scene of the movie which doesn't feel like the last moments of the film. It feels like
21:03 there should be a couple of extra moments to wrap up the characters properly, but instead Gahand
21:09 opts to deliberately smash cut into credits directly after the coup de grace and gives us
21:14 one final image exposing gradually underneath which when finally revealed honestly I felt was
21:21 a bit on the nose. It deliberately evokes imagery that we saw in the Iraq war and it just felt a
21:27 little bit too obvious and a bit pah. It feels like Garland does some big swings in the last
21:33 five minutes of the movie but goes through them so quickly they don't land properly and honestly
21:39 feel a bit misjudged. It ends the film on a more sour note than was probably intended.
21:45 But I also can't deny that this movie really left me shaken. I stepped out of the cinema
21:51 and I went into the toilets and I started gradually taking out my ear protection and I
21:57 just had to exhale to myself and just release the tension that had been built up in me for the last
22:05 two hours. I felt like in that moment almost comparable to Lee that I'd been through this
22:11 awful traumatic thing that I'd seen sights I didn't want to see and I just had to take a moment
22:18 to just reorientate myself back to reality and that speaks to the effectiveness of Civil War.
22:26 It does exactly what it set out to do and makes you feel like you're a part of the war zone and
22:33 it's even more potent because it feels so chillingly relevant and timely. I do think that
22:40 in the future this movie will get reassessed particularly in a less politically frayed
22:46 moment. I won't deny that it's a flawed movie but it's an ambitious one that succeeds at more things
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