A review of Alex Garland's Civil War, a great and totally modern war film that is discomfiting and balanced between beauty and horror. The movie, set in a near-future America at war with itself, features ravishing moments, an incredible performance from Kirsten Dunst, and a heart-stopping pace. However, it is also excruciating and built around a moral center.
Great war films – and I’d call Alex Garland ’s Civil War a great and totally modern war film – should be discomfiting. That’s the moral calculus: war is hell, and any depiction of it should be tinted with the reality of violence and death. It’s how you get something as operatic and brutal as Platoon or the frightful poetry of Apocalypse Now or the quiet outrage of the recent All Quiet on the Western Front. Civil War is as poised as those movies, as balanced between beauty and horror.
His prescience and fearlessness mean whatever he makes is, to my mind, essential viewing – and this is his best movie since Ex Machina. At the screening I went to, Garland said he began writing Civil War four years ago, feeling that divisiveness was at a perilous height, but today, he added, the country seems even more on the brink. The chaos in his movie is unrelenting.
Alex Garland Civil War Modern War Film Discomfiting Beauty Horror Ravishing Moments Kirsten Dunst Heart-Stopping Pace Moral Center
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