The current associations give themselves away, but the director of the Civil War does a great job of elevating his story from the present.

Géza Csákvár;

Alex Garland; Kirsten Dunst;

2024-04-23 13:16:00

Heroic march of journalists.

Alex Garland is the kind of director who likes to analyze the social and political problems of the present, but he separates these topics sufficiently from reality and talks about them in the form of authorial dystopias – just think of his plays Ex Machina or Expedition. The British creator was given a record budget in many respects by the A24 studio, fifty million US dollars (a lot for a boutique studio, but a pittance for a spectacular war film) to dream big. As the preliminary information leaked out, the excitement about the Civil War grew: according to some reports, Garland was inspired by the siege of the Capitol in 2021, and it was only a step from there to the birth of the opinion articles that Garland is a possible new post-Trump victory, disintegrated USA creates – but what does a British guy have to do with it? – and, of course, there was also the question of how tasteful it is to screen a film with such a theme in an election year in a divided country.

Before we say that we don’t understand, since in an advanced European culture like the Hungarian one, there was no revolution from the loud “successes” of Elkúrtuk or Blokád, it is worth knowing that it was Garland’s cinema that put an end to the debates: in the Civil War, he does everything , so that the situation cannot be easily deciphered or identified with actuality.

It is precisely the Western Powers who stand behind the federation of “woke” California and the ultra-conservative state of Texas who stand to win, so there should be a person on their feet who puts together what brought them together. But Garland doesn’t really explain anything, he doesn’t want to show a big war, he’s more interested in four individuals: four journalists at that.

Kirsten Dunst plays veteran war photojournalist Lee Smith, who travels to Washington with Joel (Wagner Moura) preparing for his last interview with the President (before the Western Powers get there, take the Capitol and finish off the dictator), and in the process, The New A veteran York Times journalist unable to retire (Stephen McKinley Henderson). At the last moment, rookie photographer Jessie (Cailee Spaeny) begs her way into the trailer. After the characters’ initial discussion of the situation, the film transitions into a war road movie, during which the journalists advance to the front line and eventually to Washington. They see plenty of absurdity and cruelty here, but the climax of the work is when they are stopped by a racist state trooper team working on a mass grave: the victims are only and exclusively non-white people. Alex Garland shows many and many kinds of death and puts the significance and beauty of journalistic work on a pedestal, even in the gruesome sense of the word.

There are many positive things to say about Garland’s Civil War.

It’s a fact that it’s a great spectacle for the little money, but it wouldn’t be worth anything without the acting. Kirsten Dunst hasn’t been this extravagant since Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia, she sees the burnt-out Jessie as her youthful self and a titan who takes over the baton, and Cailee Spainey, who plays her, gave another performance alongside Dunst that there is almost no question that it is trivially impossible to avoid him in Hollywood. And then there’s Jesse Plemons, who’s only on screen for a good five minutes as a racist soldier, but what a five minutes! Do not let fate bring you together even with a similar character. He can come to the cinema.