By “Ex Machina” and “Annihilation” director Alex Garland took to SXSW last night with the world premiere of his highly anticipated new film “Civil War”.
The story takes place in the United States in the not-so-distant future when nineteen states have seceded from the union and now is made of factions.
The action follows a warzone photographer and others making their way across a country gone mad. In a Q&A after the screening (via The Playlist), Garland says this isn’t a pointed commentary on the 2024 US Presidential election as he wrote this four years ago.
Indeed, reviews for the film indicate the alliances here are rather deliberately not a straight red state/blue state situation and are between states you may not consider natural allies (like California and Texas).
Garland indicates the aim is to universalize the conflict onscreen and how the internal concept of “American exceptionalism” that makes people feel they are immune to the problems of other countries is a falsehood:
“One of the things history shows us is that nobody is immune. Nobody is exceptional. And if we don’t apply rationality and decency and thoughtfulness to these problems, in any place, it can get out of control.”
With 25 reviews counted, the film sits at an 88% on Rotten Tomatoes with a rather high 8.3/10 average score. Here’s a sampling of reviews:
“It’s a film about the open-ended question of how much humanity we as a species have left in us, and that makes it a provocative, thrilling monster of a movie that will sear itself into your eyeballs.” – Matthew Jackson, AV Club
“It’s the most upsetting dystopian vision yet from the sci-fi brain who killed off all of London for the zombie uprising depicted in ’28 Days Later,’ and one that can’t be easily consumed as entertainment.” – Peter DeBruge, Variety
“The movie is about as apolitical as a story set during a modern American civil war can be. It’s a character piece with a lot more to say about the state of modern journalism and the people behind it than about the state of the nation.” – Tasha Robinson, Polygon
“Garland wrote the film in 2020 as he watched cogs on America’s self-mythologizing exceptionalist machine turn, propelling the nation into a nightmare. With this latest film, he sounds the alarm, wondering less about how a country walks blindly into its own destruction and more about what happens when it does” – Lovia Gyarkye, THR
“Though Civil War is told with blockbuster oomph, it often feels as frustratingly elliptical as a much smaller movie. Even so, I left the theater quite exhilarated.” – David Sims, The Atlantic
“It’s a return to form for its director after the misstep of “Men,” a film that’s grim and harrowing by design. The question is, is the emptiness that sets in once the shock has worn off intentional as well?” – Katie Rife, Indiewire
Kirsten Duntz, Nick Offerman, Wagner Moura, Cailee Spaeny, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Sonoya Mizuno, Karl Glusman, Jefferson White, Jauni Feliz, Nelson Lee, and Jesse Plemons star in the film which opens April 12th.
The post The Early “Civil War” Reviews Are In appeared first on Dark Horizons.
