Why I Wasn’t Scared by ‘Civil War’
14.04.2024 - 15:39
/ variety.com
Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic A great many people appear to have come out of “Civil War,” Alex Garland’s a-house-divided-against-itself-can-kick-highly-equipped-military-ass dystopian combat thriller, feeling all shook up. They’re disturbed by it, unsettled by it. They experience the movie as if it were holding a violent mirror up to the simmering rage of America’s current political/spiritual/ ideological divide.
Many critics have been seriously spooked by it, and so have columnists like the New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg. The filmmaker and Facebook pundit Paul Schrader said he was scared by it. And to judge from how many tickets the film is selling, in a $25 million opening weekend that bodes well for the future of adult dramas with topical resonance (on that score let’s all be grateful), I would guess that a solid portion of the audience was scared too.
But I was not scared by “Civil War,” even a little bit. Actually, there was one scene that got to me: the sequence with Jesse Plemons as a stone-cold racist military sociopath in strawberry-colored sunglasses who plays judge, jury and executioner with the nonchalance of someone lighting a cigarette. He greets our heroes, a team of war photographers, by asking each one a simple question: where they’re from.
If the answer is somewhere within the United States, that’s cool. If they came from outside the U.S., he answers that, without missing a beat, with a lethal shot from his rifle. (By the time he’s asking the question of a colleague our heroes connected with just a few scenes before, and the man coughs out “Hong Kong,” about all I could think was: Wouldn’t it have been smarter to say Omaha?) Garland invests the sequence with a hair-trigger tension, and we
.
The website celebfans.org is an aggregator of news from open sources. The source is indicated at the beginning and at the end of the announcement. You can
send a complaint on the news if you find it unreliable.