Civil War

Road To Washington -
No Crosby, No Hope

Civil War
Directed by Alex Garland
USA/UK 2024
A24
UK Theatrical Cut

Civil War is the latest movie both written and directed by Alex Garland. I actually find him a bit hit and miss in both professions, truth be told. The ones that fall into both those categories which were more hits with me were the TV show Devs (reviewed by me here) and, to an extent, his movie Men (reviewed here). This new movie, set in the very near future, is about an ongoing civil war in the USA, where the states of California and Texas team up against everyone else in an attempt to take over the country.

This story follows a seasoned ace photo-journalist called Lee (played by Kirsten Dunst) and her journalistic partner Joel (played by Wagner Moura) as they go on a 400 plus mile road trip across a war torn USA towards Washington, to try and get one last interview with the President (played fleetingly by Nick Offerman) before the combined forces of the two opposing states steamroller through and kill him (with no intent of taking any prisoners). Aiding and abetting them... or rather just tagging along for the ride but becoming seriously involved in the action... are seasoned journalist Sammy (played by Stephen McKinley Henderson) and ‘shutterbug trying to get experience in war photojournalism’ Jessie (played Cailee Spaeny).

The film is absolutely exquisite and I’ll go ahead now and say that this is easily Alex Garland’s best work ever. It’s a sometimes reflective, often chaotic and definitely violent, intense and suspenseful road movie that doesn’t itself stop to take any prisoners along the way. Now, a lot of critics have taken the tack that the film, seen through the lens of the ladies and gentlemen of the press, doesn’t make any judgement calls or take political sides (I believe Garland chose those two unlikely allied states to detract from drawing a political message)... except for one of my favourite reviewers, who said the film is indeed political. Well, I don’t know who is right about that because, as long time readers will know by now, I don’t have a political bone in my body and so probably wouldn’t recognise any points being made. That said, I certainly didn’t think the movie was trying to pontificate for any one political alignment and the take away messages I took home from it don’t, I suspect, fall into any such camp.

I took away two things. Firstly, the message I always take from any film... people shouldn’t make war or go around killing each other. Behaving like that is just crazy outside the confines of mass cultural art and entertainment. 

 But the key thing the film seems to play around with for me... and it’s another old cliché of a point but it sits right with me, is this. What kind of human being are you if you stop to take pictures of the violence and injustice going on around you and don’t put the camera down and try to help out instead? The question is none too subtly explored in this film and Kirsten Dunst’s character, who seems to be secretly haunted by this herself, certainly addresses the issue head-on in a conversation she has with Jessie at one point. Her answer is that you’re there to document and let other people make the judgements and Lee and Jessie certainly come to a conclusion with their individual grasp of that context at the end of the movie. To say anything more about that matter would be to spoil the ending but, to that end, there are also certainly characters in the movie who, in the parlance of Star Trek, are definitely ‘red shirts’.

And the film is shot really well, edited really well and has brilliant sound design. I mean, sure, all the sound cliches are in there such as using upbeat or trivial songs juxtaposed to the horrors of a situation to highlight them... or the old chestnut of letting the music take over to the point where that’s all there is on the soundtrack, before it suddenly drops out and the artillery and explosions of the situation rush in to give a shot in the arm to the audience. But, clichés become that because they work really well and Garland and his colleagues use them to great advantage here.

Lastly, I have to say a word about the acting performances in this. Everybody is absolutely great but special shout outs go to both Cailee Spaeny (who you are in fear for throughout the entire movie) and Kirsten Dunst (turning in what might be the greatest performance of her entire career to date, as far as I’m concerned). There’s also a short but pretty scary and intense sequence featuring Kirsten’s real life spouse Jesse Plemons, which is almost unbearable to watch... a snippet of it can be seen on the trailer.  

And that’s me done with Civil War, I think. This seems to me, from this opening end of the lifespan of the film, to be a stone cold classic which I’ll snap up on Blu Ray when the time comes and, it’s good to see this before a real civil war breaks out in either the USA or the UK anytime soon (or both, as both countries seem to be just around the corner from that, it seems to me). Definitley worth a look if you want a suspenseful time at the cinema.

Midnight Special

Eye Hopes

Midnight Special
2016 USA Directed by Jeff Nichols
UK cinema release print.

I’ve been waiting to take a look at Midnight Special since seeing a clip and then a trailer for it on the internet sometime last year. I’m not familiar with the work of Jeff Nichols because I’ve never really been all that interested in the subject matter of his previous movies but this one looked like it was a kind of Steven Spielberg style sci-fi movie with a darker edge. After now having seen the film, I can confirm that this is exactly what it is... at least that’s what it seemed like to me.

The film is very much one of those stories which relies on the audience and key players trying to figure out just exactly what is going on as the writer/director holds back on the specific details of the mystery at the heart of the movie. That mystery being the enigma of an eight year old boy called Alton Meyer, played by Jaeden Lieberher, who has eyes which light up, like one of the kids who lived in the Village Of The Damned, and has strange stuff happen around him when this occurs.

This one is very much a road movie, in that it focuses on the boy fleeing with his natural birth father Roy, played by Michael Shannon (aka General Zod in Man Of Steel), and Roy’s friend Lucas, played by Joel Edgerton (who some of you may best remember as the younger version of Owen Lars in the Star Wars prequels). They hook up with Alton’s natural birth mother Sarah, played by Kirsten Dunst, because they need to get the boy to specific coordinates by a certain time. The film is presumably called Midnight Special because the boy can only stand to be up and about in the hours of darkness... as far as we know at the start of the movie.

However, the four are 'fleeing' to these coordinates because they are being aggressively pursued by two factions who want the boy. One faction is The Ranch... a religious group whose chief, played by Sam Sheppard, uses the boy’s words when he has ‘lighty up eye fits’ for his sermons. The people in The Ranch believe that the boy is the new messiah who will keep them safe if he is with them when Judgement Day comes... which they think is just a few days away.

The other faction who are pursuing, not as aggressively but certainly more effectively, is the FBI. They want the boy because the words he has been blurting out when he ‘goes into one’ and which Sam Sheppard has been using for his sermons, contains top secret information and they want to know just how the young ‘un got the intel and what the heck he is. They’re actually better at their pursuit because a young specialist called Sevier, played by Adam Driver (aka Kylo Ren in Star Wars - The Force Awakens), has joined them and has figured out that part of Alton’s words are coordinates.

And so we have a road movie with a mystery at it’s heart as the family and their friend try to survive and get Alton to where he needs to be in order for... something... to happen. Is it the approaching Religious apocalypse? Is it some alien weirdness? Or is it... something else? Well I’m not going to spoil that for you here but I will say that the writer/director certainly doesn’t cop out on the ending of his film. You will see... stuff. And if you think about it a little afterwords and dwell on the last second or so of the very last shot, it does all make a certain kind of sense, although one or two interpretations could come into play here. I’m still puzzled by one specific aspect of something that happens three quarters of the way into the movie so... maybe I should watch it again at some point.

In terms of performances, the film is terrific, with Shannon, Edgerton, Dunst and Lieberher all doing a terrific job. As does Adam Driver, who I completely hated in Star Wars - The Force Awakens but who does an outstanding job playing an immensely likeable person here. So I feel a lot better about seeing this guy in stuff from here on out. The acting is all very low key too and the cinematography and the way the camera rambles smoothly around the scenes matches this. In fact, it’s so low key that, despite the gripping mystery at the film’s fiery heart, I noticed it was having an almost soporific effect on me in some places. It’s kind of interesting actually because it reminded me of something I saw years ago in a fake Steve Martin documentary. Paul Simon asked him if he thought a sad subject in a song works better in an upbeat tempo, or some such thing. It got me thinking about the relationship between the message and the messenger and how a seemingly inappropriate delivery style can actually enhance the original message. I guess another cinematic equivalent might be the invocation of Singin’ In The Rain in Stanley Kubrik’s version of A Clockwork Orange.

Well I think that’s one of Midnight Special’s strengths... and it’s a very common approach in certain strands of science fiction, although that doesn’t negate it’s impact here... is that the acting and shooting style are quite dialled down in order to give a certain weight or credibility to the extremely fantastical concept it’s trying to sell to the audience. If you want people to suspend disbelief and buy into these kinds of concepts without any irony so the drama of the subject can be brought into play, then downplaying the absolute gobsmacking premise of your story springboard is as good a way as any of doing it. Not the only way but, it’s obviously the way Nichols' has chosen to go here and it works very effectively.

Another thing which contributes effectively to the overall atmosphere of the thing is the score by David Wingo. It’s fairly stripped down and not something which relies on dense orchestration... I would definitely call it transparent writing... but it does have a main theme which hooks you in right from the start and keeps coming back at certain points in the movie to cement everything together. It’s a pretty good score and, although it’s not the kind of score I would normally listen to, I’ll probably be picking up the CD to this one at some point in the future, to be sure.

So that’s about all I’ve got to say about Midnight Special. It’s a short review for a short film but I was surprised by just how effective it was and I certainly didn’t feel cheated by the solution, such as it is, of the mystery of Alton Meyer. There’s even a hint of how the story could possibly carry on contained at the very tail end of the very last shot... although, again, that shot is open to interpretation and I certainly wouldn’t want to see the producers wreck the memory of this movie by making a sequel, at any rate. However, if you’ve got nothing better to do with your time at the moment, I would say that Midnight Special is one of the cooler films playing at your local cinema at the moment. So maybe give it a go if you are at a loose end. After all, with General Zod and Kylo Ren in the movie... anything could happen.

Melancholia

Melancholia Baby

Melancholia 2011 Denmark/Sweden/France/Germany

Directed by Lars Von Trier

Screening at UK cinemas.

Warning: Earth shattering spoilers ensue!

Melancholia is, quite simply, one of the most visually beautiful films of 2011.

It’s no surprise to me in the slightest, though I’ve only seen a few of his films, that Von Trier can deliver such beautiful and meticulous work... but to people who associate him with the Dogme ‘95 movement, the sheer artificial beauty of his creations may come as a bit of a surprise. But like I said... not to me.

I first became aware of Von Trier back in 1991 (wow, I’ve been watching this guy on and off for 20 years?) when I went to the old Lumiere cinema in St. Martin’s Lane to see his brilliant movie Europa (aka Zentropa in some countries). It was the first film I remember seeing which relly wallowed in it’s own artificial construction to create elaborate effects on screen. The first movie I could remember, specifically, barring minor moments like a single shot in Rumblefish, where both colour and black & white photography collided on screen in beautifully surreal moments where they would bleed into each other’s separate elements like a mixed media collage. And when I say bleed, it really did in certain scenes... I remember well, one character slashing his wrists into a bowl of water in black and white and the blood flowing into the water as a bright red element.

Backgrounds could be changed too like an old 50's Hollywood rear projection shot... except here the technique was almost flawless and a character could be interacting in a real environment which could suddenly turn into a visual metaphor in the background.

It came as a bit of a shock, I would have to say, when Von Trier founded the Dogme ‘95 group with their pledge to remove pretty much all artificality from film. This never stood well with me and I was quite vocal at the time because it’s pretty obvious to me that you can’t make a movie without at least lighting or tweaking or positioning some element of a shot... the very act of which surely renders void the entire exercise in the first place. It was not that unexpected when even the first film that came out of the gate of this experimental style broke it’s own rules and many followed suit (is my understanding) in this lack of rigidity to contribute to a pretty much impossible, idealistic concept.

I remember seeing Von Trier’s Dogville (and getting bored about a half of the way through the movie), a film clearly named after the manifesto of its creator, and thinking to myself that the act of stripping down a whole community to invisible rooms marked out with white lines and labels was far more artifical in its nature than just filming in such a community could ever be.

I got back into Von Trier when his last movie, Antichrist, came out and thought this movie was pretty okay and it certainly shares the same sheer visual beauty as his new movie Melancholia... so he’s definitely back into a new phase of his work, now free to embrace the artifice of his craft once more.

Melancholia starts off with some surreal and occasionally confusing imagery... some of which I believe is based on a group of paintings that one of the two lead protagonists, Justine (played by Kirsten Dunst) puts out on display in one of her “funny spells”. Definitely spotted a nod to that Pre-Raphaelite painting of the girl in the lake which was responsible for the death of the model (no, I’m sorry, I don’t remember the name of this famous painting). The other main protagonist, her sister Claire (played by Charlotte Gainsbourg), has some very heavy footsteps in a field in this sequence which remind me of another painting, the title of which also escapes me (Not doing very well on the art front am I? Sorry people). After some 5 or 10 minutes of beautiful imagery, the earth is destroyed as it collides with another planet and, all through the film we are encouraged to assume that this is how the movie will end (although the giveaway clue here is Dunst seen in two different dresses). After the title card immediately following the destruction of the earth, the film is then split into two parts seemingly set before the events just depicted have taken place...each part named after their central characters. The first part deals with Justine who is going to her own wedding reception at claire’s mansion house. Over the course of this fairly gruelling sequence (if, like me, you are not a social animal) we see her wreck both her marriage and her career in an uncomfortable haze of aggressive depression, possibly manifested by the newly discovered planet Melancholia which appears to be on a collision course with earth, in front of a whole host of big name supporting cast (such as Charlotte Rampling, John Hurt, Stellan Skaarsgard and even Claire’s husband played by Kiefer Sutherland).

The second part, named after Claire, is set some time after (a few months perhaps) when Justine is so depressed she can’t even get out of bed without major coaxing by her sister (yeah, did this stuff remind me big time of my ex-girlfriend) and tells of Claire’s fear of her belief that the earth will be pulverised by Melancholia, her husband’s certainty that it won’t and, their son who is getting as excited as his dad by this rare astronomical discovery. It also shows Justine in sharp contrast still to her sister, with whom she doesn’t share much in common. However, it also becomes apparent that Justine can see things that are going to happen and she believes Melancholia will be the death of them all (even when it seems to be receding) and is not frightened by it but is happy to embrace the peace that death will bring to her.

It has to be said at this point that nothing really happens in terms of story (except for, you know, the destruction of the entire planet). It is a beautifully framed and never boring study of the thoughts and actions of two diametrically opposed sisters who are anticipating the approaching end of the world. In this way, it perhaps shares a commonality with Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice or Akira Kurosawa’s I Live In Fear (aka Record Of A Living Being) but the film is very much its own thing and is an absolute joy to watch... although be warned it is quite bleak in some ways.

If I had one complaint about the film in general it’s that we didn’t need to see the destruction of the world at the end... we know it’s inevitable, leave it unsaid and end the movie half a day before it occurs maybe? However, having said that, the shot of the death of the world at the end does elaborate the point that the imagery at the start of the film was actually nothing more than a visionary “premonition of events” by Justine and not a fixed point we’ve flashed back too... there are clues in the dialogue which may lead you to this conclusion that the opening is not actually a flashback but something else entirely... but the end shot certainly leaves no doubt in the mind of the viewer about the nature of the movie’s prologue.

As I’ve implied, I would have expected and liked to have seen a more ambiguous ending to this movie in terms of the sometimes surreal opening montage, but maybe I just prefer less clarity and room to speculate with works like this. And, anyway, Kirsten Dunst does have scenes where she takes her clothes off... so that more than outweighs the slight dissatisfaction with the last minute or two of the movie.

Don’t miss Melancholia. A beautiful film made by an artist with a sure, steady and confident hand as befitting the longevity of his career. It probably won’t be playing for long so catch this visual magic while it’s still playing on the big screen!