Let’s talk about Civil War
The movie, I mean.
Mrs. Woe and I went to see Alex Garland’s Civil War last Sunday evening.1 It’s worth seeing, and if you’re going to see the movie, see it on the big screen at a good theater. We saw it with Dolby Cinema and it was a powerful experience. Our seats vibrated with every gun shot, every helicopter, every explosion. Neither of us had experienced such a visceral war movie since Saving Private Ryan.
Warning: The remainder of this essay will contain spoilers for the movie.
After finishing Civil War, my wife and I discussed its politics. Both of us agreed that Garland had done such a good job of making the movie sufficiently opaque that an average American of either Blue or Red persuasion could enjoy it. Most people would, we felt, look no deeper than the superficial message: “civil war bad.”
But we also both concluded it was, at its core, a left-wing movie. “Given the movie’s left-wing sentiments, the progressive critics must have loved it,” I thought. “Let’s see what they have to say!”
So I opened up Wired.com to read its review, entitled
The Troubling Politics of Alex Garland’s Civil War:
When director Alex Garland sat down in 2020 to write his new movie, Civil War, he was clearly worried about the polarization of American society. The Covid-19 pandemic was just beginning to take hold, and former US president Donald Trump was still in the White House. It was a much different country from the one in which Garland is releasing his biggest film to date.
Garland [has] created… a far-right fantasy recruiting tool. In Civil War, Garland’s apocalyptic US features a country ostensibly stripped of partisan labels, where both the left and right become intolerant of each other and turn deadly….
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
