UKH

Saw this last night before it came off the big screen.  Blown away. The settings, the soundtrack, the superimposition of the state of conflict on the USA, the roller coaster of the last 25 minutes and then that final minute or two leaving you with the image the credits roll on.  It's going to be a thinker for sure.

I asked my brother who lives in San Francisco and is pretty much a naturalised US Citizen if he'd seen it "Never even heard of it" he said, I'm not sure if that was sincere or some manifestation of patriotism at a time when we are staring down the barrel of another Trump presidency.

Any opinions?  As ever the internet seems to be torn between"Nah, it was rubbish" and "Masterpiece".

It's done well in the US and I've heard plenty of discussion of it on the slightly high brow US podcasts I listen to. Is your brother interested in films? Big country - so I'm sure it has passed millions by, but it has been seen by many too https://variety.com/2024/film/box-office/box-office-a24s-civil-war-wins-wee...

I thought it was very good although like many political nerds, I was interested in how the war had broken out, which of course it doesn't really cover.

It was one of those weird ones for me when as soon as at ended I was pretty awed and shell shocked, but a bit like films like Tennant or Inception, the more I thought about it the more I thought it was flawed. I just didn't get Kirstin Dunst's character arc at the end, it didn't quit seem to make sense to me. Also for a film that was ment to be about the horrors of war there was a lot of shooty macho rubbish in the last few scenes. 

Thought the rest was pretty powerful stuff though. The white supremacist bit was very well done.

I didn’t find any glorification in those last few scenes, just shock and some revulsion about the actions. I thought the fighting sections were done amazingly well, often being shockingly loud in the cinema, generally coming after a quieter scene.

I think it’s a great film, but can see why people have issues with it. I think some wanted it to be a specifically liberal anti Trump thing, where Garland has done a great job of leaving it ambiguous (even the choices of the states rebelling). I’m also not sure how realistic any of it is really meant to be, with so many of the characters essentially being somewhat archetypal. 

Wasn't that part of the point though? As the male character screamed after the first firefight (to a soundtrack of De La Soul, loved that) "What a f**king rush!".  And agree with Arms Cliff about how well they were done, could practically hear the military adviser in the background for the scenes in the corridors. 

The biggest clue I saw was the question about running for a third term, but I didn't mind this not being expressed. 

I will freely admit my knowledge of realistic urban warfare is somewhat lacking! So perhaps I was being a bit unfair. I just found what seemed like a portrayal of heroism/goodies vs badies at the end jarring with the rest if the film where the ambiguity over who was actually fighting who was one if the main features. 

Like Toby, I’ve also read a lot of discussion about the film from the US, but I read a lot of nerdy political stuff that sane people ignore.

Enjoyed it, but for a film about journalism it really gets the journalists very wrong. 

The "goodies" shoot a lot of people including unarmed injured people, so although I also "read" the politics as govt. - bad, rebels - good, it isn't like you see Luke Skywalker shooting unarmed injured storm troopers in the head as he walks through the death star in Star Wars. So Civil War shows the harshness and coarsening effects on all sides - take no prisoners etc. But clearly the openness to journalists, the black woman sergeant in the final scene, the snipers with nail polish/hair dye etc. all suggest the Western Forces are the liberal legacy side and the US govt is fascist. I'm surprised in the US so many people said it was apolitical.

But the sniper with nail polish never says which side he is on! I didn't get a sense of any goodies and baddies (sunglasses excepted - he'd completely lost his moral compass along the way) apart from the president who'd brought them into the abyss, and I thought that was pretty ballsy in this election year. 

Anyone else clock the unit the Chinooks were from? 

Right now, with the ghastly wars going on in Ukraine, Gaza etc, my appetite for seeing any war movies is exactly zero.

Good job it isn’t really a war movie then…

This is a cautionary tale of a film, there’s no glorification of the conflict at all 

Sure, but the government forces "are shooting journalists in DC", whist androgynous snipers are just amusingly sarcastic to our hero hacks. Likewise the boogaloo boys storming the college campus, despite the boogaloo aesthetic, are multi-racial and journo friendly. Garland did agree on Kermode and Mayo's film reviews that the president and his supporters are fascist. 

Yeah fair point!

During which other conflicts in your lifetime did you have an appetite for seeing war movies, John? Presumably the ones that weren't ghastly for you. 

Presumption dead wrong. I think ghastly war should be depicted as ghastly.

My reservation about watching war movies now is simply the juxtaposition with real ghastly wars going on at the same time. To give you an analogy: if I were visiting a dying relative in hospital every day, I would have no appetite for watching movies about terminally ill people during that period.

The ghastly wars always were going on; you do know that, right?

It's the unjust ones, supported by my tax dollars, that are my main source of grieve.

So do you carefully examine the circumstances of each conflict and work out if one or other of the sides is justified? Or do you just get angry about what you see on the TV news? 

Did you watch no war films during the entire Noughties then? Or was Iraq and Afghanistan justified? Why is Ukraine not justified?

“From the Tigris to the Eurphrates, the people of Iraq will be liberated,” was the cry on every freedom lover’s lips back then, don’t you remember?

Folks, I feel the thread derailing, John's made his point, let's leave it there?  Or I guess there could be an interesting tangent into "When are war films ever justifiable?" but it's kind of missing the point of the thread which was "What did you think of the film Civil War" (which arguably isn't a war film anyway, more of a road movie).

Yeah, d'you remember that scruff Benjy off Dog House a couple of years ago? When that kid chose the cute pup I was gutted! Benjy's still there, no-one cares, it makes me so angry.

My wife saw it.  Her opinion was that it had a ridiculous premise badly delivered and would only satisfy the brain-dead gun fetishist.

T.

Certainly provoked a strong reaction then! Hard to follow up any more as it's second hand opinion, but did she elaborate on what part of the premise was ridiculous, or how it was badly delivered? I'll leave the brain dead gun fetishist bit out as I only have so much time between flossing between my ears and reading Guns and Ammo monthly: )

Interesting. Not seen it yet, but looking at the negative reviews it seems they're all from:

a. Brain-dead gun fetishists, because there's not enough shooting;

b. Americans who cannot accept that God's own state of Texas would ever ally itself with godless, communist California.

I will watch it soon, trailer looked great - but one thing that irks me is some sort of alliance between California and Texas? Seems very odd given their basically states in opposition. Interested t see how/if this alliance is explained.

It isn’t. It’s an alternative universe rather than an extrapolation of our current one. Worth remembering that Southern California in particular was a Republican stronghold for a long time, and that the state as a whole returned Republican governors such as Reagan and Schwartzeneger. To flip things around, the big cities of Texas are fairly Democratic, in contrast to the vast majority of the state. Or consider the strange alliances that occur in the face of oppression, whether that’s Nehru and Jinnah against the British (they wanted two completely different outcomes) or the British and Americans working closely with the Soviets in WW2. 
 

A good work of art leaves some things a little ambiguous, rather than creating a vast canon of facts. Refusing to explain the politics is one of the good things about the film.

I thought it was extremely powerful and scarily believable, lets hope it's not a portent of things to come. I imagine that more remote warfare, using drones etc would be more likely in the future, I can't imagine any young person signing up for such savage fighting. It certainly woke me up to the horrors of war and I found the journalist characters believable despite their empathy being buried deep, and a an illustration of how good women are at the job. See it!

Yes, I thought this seemed a bit of a stretch, especially when there is no explanation in the film about the cause of the war. I wondered if it was a convenient way of justifying how the alliance had so many military resources at its disposal, given that they are the two richest states.

Apart from this issue, I thought the decision to not give any background to the way worked well so as not to distract from the story they were actually trying to tell.

Mild spoilers below...

Overall, I enjoyed the film. It was very tense and the final sequence into the White House was superbly directed action, and all three leads were good. However, I am not sure it really made much of a point about the horrors of war that hasn't been made better before...as someone said upthread, it felt more like a road movie to me (it reminded me of The Last of Us in some ways), with some great action scenes . 

Fair enough, I'll reserve judgement until this evening if it's available on my hooky stick.

It's just given current attitudes in California/Texas represent the political conflict in wider contemporary America in 2024, the use of these two states as allies just seems a bit jarring.

If it's meant to be alternate-universe, that's really not clear going off the trailer. It looks to be an uber near-future dystopia following our the current trajectory.

IMO extrapolation is what the best dystopian films do, not ambiguity. ie. World War Z, 28 Days Later, V for Vendetta, etc.

I haven't had chance to watch the film yet, so take my thoughts with an extra pinch of salt, but the impression I get is that those two states were probably chosen because of the different stances they represent rather than despite those differences. If you chose either state alone, or put one of them together with more obvious allies, that side of the conflict instantly becomes identified with a particular side in the real-world political division and changes how everyone views the film pretty drastically. Each political party's supporters would be predisposed to one side or the other as soon as those states were revealed if the alliance wasn't so deliberately ambiguous.

It depicts a roughly current era America undergoing a civil war, something vanishingly unlikely to happen - how much clearer do you need it to be that this is an alternative universe?! And more philosophically, isn’t every story an alternative universe? Mr Darcy did not exist, despite Pride and Prejudice’s ultra realism. 

It’s quite clear when you watch it that this is not in fact the case. That’s one purpose of the CA-TX alliance - to alert us to this.

Well ambiguous films aren’t for everyone… 

What Luke says above is spot on. 

I finally caught up with this yesterday.I thought it was very chilling for though it didn't describe in detail a political narrative in to how the civil war had broken out it did illustrate that 'civil war' in the 21st century might well tip this very fragmented society  into one giant mass shooting event.