Alex Garland’s ‘Civil War’ is LARPing for the Ladies of The View – Awardsdaily
I don't normally write negative reviews of films on this site. It's never been my practice to do so in the 25 years I've been running it. This won't be a negative review of sorts. This isn't about the writing, which is awkward, or the acting, which is fine. The film gets high marks for great visuals and graphic violence.…
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Awardsdaily
I don’t normally write negative reviews of films on this site. It’s never been my practice to do so in the 25 years I’ve been running it. This won’t be a negative review of sorts. This isn’t about the writing, which is awkward, or the acting, which is fine. The film gets high marks for great visuals and graphic violence. What matters more, at least for me, is what the movie says about this moment. And about our country.

Civil War is a movie that brings to life the delusional fever dreams of people like Rob Reiner, Bill Maher, Joy Behar, Whoopi Goldberg, Barbra Streisand and countless others. The more MSNBC a person watches, the more likely they are to see Civil War as our potential future should Donald Trump get re-elected. This movie is exactly what they believe would happen.

You won’t find many negative reviews for Civil War on Rotten Tomatoes. As always, the critics will spout the party line because the film reflects how they see the world. That will be especially true for people who have become obsessed with the “us vs. them” mentality that is ripping this country apart. No, it isn’t on “both sides.” It’s on one side, the side with all the power.

Most critics are also afraid to stand apart. They exist in a hive mind, but there’s a good chance the audience reviews will reflect something very different. Right now, the film has 54 reviews on RT at 93%.

It’s summed up this way at RT:

Tough and unsettling by design, Civil War is a gripping close-up look at the violent uncertainty of life in a nation in crisis.

But that isn’t true. Civil War reflects the fear and anxiety of the ruling class in this country as it faces a significant confrontation by the middle and working class. It is one they can’t see. They are surfing on hubris and fantastical imaginings because their empire is crumbling. True of the legacy media, true of Hollywood, true of the Democratic Party. It is not a matter of “if” but “when.” A counterculture revolution will be upon us to force the change they can’t make on their own.

There is a great quote about Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovitch on the Russian empire before the revolution, “the last spectacular ball in the history of the empire … [but] a new and hostile Russia glared through the large windows of the palace … while we danced, the workers were striking and the clouds in the Far East were hanging dangerously low.”

The film Civil War will hold its place as a time capsule that reflects how the people at the top see their greatest threat – a takeover by a fascist dictator who refuses to leave office. Gee, who’s that supposed to be? Hm. It will come to me anytime now.

A friend of mine said he almost got a boner at the end of Civil War. You can bet the ladies of the View will cry and cheer too, as the thing they all dream about unfolds on film. Finally, a movie that puts it all together: 9 years of systematic dehumanization, demonization, and marginalization played out as a fantasy so they can finally get their man, at least in a movie.

His subsequent texts to me included things like this about former President Trump:

“He deserves to die a violent death.”

“If there is a God he would be dead.”

“I felt a very good feeling.”

And there you have it. Despite Garland’s attempts to make the film neutral, he has delivered a fantasy narrative inside the minds of people who exist in a fear bunker, have long since become disconnected from real life, and who are tormented only by one person and his followers.

If there is any real genius in Civil War (I do not believe there is. It’s agitprop, not art), it’s that he doesn’t really explain why the President is “bad.” But he doesn’t have to. No one on the Left has to explain it. They felt this way before Trump was elected, all through his presidency, and onward to now, where he has been indicted four times, impeached twice, and still leads the Democrats in the polls. No wonder they have lost their minds. The only thing that hasn’t happened to him is assassination.

They’ve never been able to offer anything better and they have never addressed the problem of why Trump is popular in the first place. They seem just about ready for gulags to purge their Woketopia of the bad people who can’t quit Trump as their choice for representation.

For people whose singular obsession in life remains Donald Trump they will probably love Civil War as it gives them exactly what they need to sleep at night. We’re still the good guys, right? We’re still the good guys, RIGHT?

You’re still the good guys as long as you aren’t white men, and then there’s a chance you are still the bad guys because everything is decided by race and gender. That is why Civil War’s protagonists are your typical “woke” Bento Box – every kind of person EXCEPT a white male. We have to know who the bad guys are, and they’re ALWAYS going to be white men. Always.

Although Garland tries really hard not to be “we’re the good guys, right?” he has to show one moment that reflects exactly what the ruling class thinks of most of the working class in this country with the character of who shoots people if they’re not “from America.” The “good” people are women – I assume that Cailee Spaeny in the film exists solely to represent the Queer community, and there’s Kirsten Dunst, there’s Stephen McKinley Henderson, and Brazilian actor Wagner Moura all representing real “journalists” who have to get an interview with the Trump-like figure in the White House. Their drive across a few Southern states amid Civil War is the whole movie, with an explosive Zero Dark Thirty-like ending that gave my friend a hard-on.

The road trip is the only really good part of the movie, with dead bodies hanging from trees, casulaties everywhere. You can just hear the ladies of The View saying unironically, if Trump wins this will be America.

That we have to suffer through the terrible writing of the film’s main characters is the price we pay to gaze upon the wasteland. We don’t know what they’re fighting about, not really, but we assume from the casting that there is a war based on the idea that America is for white Americans. It isn’t that clearly delineated, but it hums underneath the surface.

The filmmakers went to great lengths to say that the film doesn’t represent any political parties, but come on, who are they kidding? By now, we know what all of Hollywood already thinks because they can’t shut up about it. It’s everything, everywhere all of the time. People like Rob Reiner see half the country as human garbage at best and Nazis at worst. This film reflects that point of view, even if not overtly. There is no room for the “other side” to see themselves except negatively.

In making the story about “real journalists,” anyone on the Right will instantly know what is wrong with the movie. Journalists are largely why we’re in this mess, to begin with. There is a reason people in Germany felt safer when they moved the Jews out, or why Southern whites felt safer when they segregated the country. Propaganda convinces weak-minded people to go along with anything. Propaganda drives the legacy media here and now as they spend every day telling their audience that they’re the “good guys” and those people over there are the “bad guys.” They’re racists, they insist. And bigots.

Here is a ten minute video from Racket’s America This Week with two prominent outsider voices who speak the truth on their podcast in a way we do not hear in the mainstream. This is Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn. The whole transcipt is here:

Every so often, a good piece of investigative journalism breaks through the cloud cover, like this piece in The Atlantic by Tyler Austin Harper:

The opening paragraph:

Rage is the subject of a new book by the political scientist Tom Schaller and the journalist Paul Waldman. White Rural Rage, specifically. In 255 pages, the authors chart the racism, homophobia, xenophobia, violent predilections, and vulnerability to authoritarianism that they claim make white rural voters a unique “threat to American democracy.” White Rural Rage is a screed lobbed at a familiar target of elite liberal ire. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, the authors appeared on Morning Joe, the book inspired an approving column from The New York Times’ Paul Krugman, and its thesis has been a topic of discussion on podcasts from MSNBC’s Chuck Todd and the right-wing firebrand Charlie Kirk. The book has become a New York Times best seller.

The story of our extreme polarization is easy to follow if you do not read the New York Times, listen to NPR, watch CNN, or watch MSNBC. Those outlets exist to give people who live inside the bubble of the Left what they want to hear. Like Hollywood and much of corporate America, they have abandoned most people in this country and do not think their stories matter unless they somehow prop up their driving ideology of “woke” exclusionary utopian living.

We watched this dynamic play out in the Summer of 2020 when an essay by Senator Tom Cotton caused its own Civil War at the New York Times. And though they left up the piece, with reporters being fired, it still has a “note” attached to it to please the crybabies on Twitter and on their staff. That was bad enough. Then, we watched just recently as MSNBC and NBC threw temper tantrums when former RNC chair Ronna McDaniel was hired as a correspondent. There you saw, if you didn’t know before, what has become of “journalism.”

There are so many great stories to tell, but no one will tell them. They can’t tell them, not in Hollywood, not in the mainstream news. Here is an example of a story from the Summer of 2020 that would have been a great part to include in the movie Civil War to show what happened in this country that the media continued to insist was “mostly peaceful protests.” These folks were white so they were not of value to the media. Only local news covered the story. But it has stuck with me ever since.

Why did no one care about the lives of people in Kenosha? Well, do I really have to answer that?

One good thing from the Tom Cotton debacle is that Bari Weiss left the paper and started a counterculture revolution with her own thriving news site, The Free Press, over at Substack. And just today, a confessional validating what many of us already knew:

It’s true NPR has always had a liberal bent, but during most of my tenure here, an open-minded, curious culture prevailed. We were nerdy, but not knee-jerk, activist, or scolding.

In recent years, however, that has changed. Today, those who listen to NPR or read its coverage online find something different: the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population.

If you are conservative, you will read this and say, duh, it’s always been this way.

I have patiently waited for the bricks to fall out of this wall – for journalists to snap out of it. But to do so requires enormous courage. They must risk losing everything: their jobs, friends, and status. Speaking out is a revolutionary act itself now, on the Left anyway. If you humanize Trump or his supporters you are OUT.

But the real problem is how they all have destroyed themselves and the once-great counterculture empire that has given us so much for so many decades. The creative spirit is snuffed out when you are forced to tell stories only one way. That’s what has happened to Hollywood. They tell a false version of reality to match the Woketopia they’ve built, but they can’t tell us what is happening now.

I was hoping Alex Garland’s Civil War would do that, and in some places, it does, but not enough. Where we are right now is covered already in George Orwell’s 1984. Trump exists to the Left as an ongoing threat to do two things. 1) deflect from their failings, and 2) to prevent the people from rising up against the government in ways they already have been since 2000.

In Orwell’s 1984, Trump would be the Goldstein figure, per this video:

The transcript:

“Goldstein is introduced as the enemy of the people during the Two Minutes of Hate at the beginning of the novel.

It’s all laid out perfectly like a trail of breadcrumbs, yet here we are, and what can we do except watch in horror as the whole thing comes crashing down?

Garland’s Civil War is a movie that the party loyalists would have made as fantasy fiction for his followers to get “boners” at watching Goldstein’s demise.

Two Minutes of Hate is essentially what the media has done to this country for eight years now and counting. And look at where it has taken us. Look at where it has taken them.

If Garland really wanted to meet this moment, a more interesting version of Civil War would have been to see it this way: since 2000, the American people have been rising up on the Left and the Right to protest what has become an oligarchal government, no longer of the people, by the people, and for the people. But a system designed to preserve the power of a government that has become too big to fail. And very wealthy people who want to keep their stuff.

In 1999, the World Trade Organization protests began. Bad trade deals sent jobs overseas and hollowed out the middle class.

2008-2011 – Occupy Wall Street to protest the $700 billion bailout of the banks. Massive, throughout the country, a call to end corruption at the top.

2009 – The Tea Party, to protest the same thing. Now you had two populist groups rising on the Left and the Right that were challenging our government in ways we hadn’t seen in decades. But Barack Obama was The President. So how do you protest against him? Well, you shift away from the concerns of the people in terms of class and you make it all about race, and other marginalized groups. And just like that, Wokeism is born.

While Occupy was disbanded and discredit, it ultimately transformed into the Bernie Sanders movement, The Tea Party, was demonized as “racist” by celebrities and journalists at the outset. How convenient.

Right around this time, “Woke Capitalism” was born and the rise of Critical Theory, wokeness in Hollywood and throughout culture. This was a great way for the people at the top never to address any of the problems of the working class.

Big corporations, Hollywood and the Democrats now had a great way to separate themselves as the good people without ever having to pay any attention to the millions left behind. All major institutions abandoned them – especially Hollywood. It’s worse than that. They blamed the audience for what was an industry making billions off of them for years that now was shocked, shocked that there was so much whiteness going on here.

They decided that they would make the audience pay the price by transforming all of their movies into virtue signals to protect themselves. They would use marginalized people as shields, just as the Biden administration is doing now. How easy it was for them never to have to address any of their own failings because they hide behind women, people of color, and the transgender community as protection from the Children Spies who seek to call out all the “thought criminals.”

Now, they have to preserve their goodness by continuing to separate themselves – with an us vs. them ideology. But it has all but killed their brand, destroyed art, made storytelling impossible and has not solved the problem of the middle class left behind. They can’t tell stories about them or for them because they do not know them anymore. Orwell had it exactly right.

And Trump proved most useful of all, just like Goldstein. As long as he’s the focus, no one is ever going to challenge them or protest them.

Alex Garland might have made a better movie if he understood what this moment is really about. But how could he if no one in the mainstream, or inside the bubble, will tell him the truth?