Civil War (A24 - Alex Garland, Spring 2024) • Page 18

The only film I’ve seen this year that I like more than Civil War is Dune 2

 

yup

 

Dune 2, Monkey Man, Love Lies Bleeding, Drive Away Dolls, Zone of Interest and The Beekeeper are all the movies I saw in theaters this year that are better than civil war.

 

my favorite part of The Beekeeper was that it was SO CLEARLY filmed in England but they would throw lines in like 'What's that way? Springfield. What's that way? Boston.' to at least pretend they were trying to make it look like MA

 

agreed

 

Box Office: ‘Civil War’ Draws Blood to Beat ‘Abigail’ and Stay No. 1 With $11M Second Weekend

 

This was a solid 7 imo, decent movie that is hurt by its own vagueness

 

I feel like this will be my take as well once I finally see it

 

Will catch up on this thread later, but I'm dropping in to eat crow and say this was very good. It is not the movie they're advertising or the movie people think it is, and that's for the better. It made me feel a lot more than I was expecting, which I'll expand on after I chew on it a bit and get around to writing about it this weekend. I still don't understand thanking Andy Ngo or the transphobe and think that was a weird and bad call, but as a film? This played to all of Garland's strengths. Just really well-paced and engaging stuff.

 

Big reason why this worked for me as I have been purposely cutting out current events via social media for the past four-five months. The idea of self-preservation vs. apathy and how "not taking a side" can absolutely be a poor show of character, even if it feels like what you need to stay sane. By giving us a neutral canvas of sorts and allowing the audience read into different characters/"sides" in different ways, the film actually led. me to identifying with the journalists and not liking what I saw. So just the fact that this one affected me so much is enough for me to feel strongly about it, which certainly came as a surprise to me.

 

y'all were really in here ranking movies with no relation to each other smdh

see, purposeful or not, this is actually how the film felt to me and why I liked it

 

Seeing this next week. Took me a while to find tickets because it’s called 帝國浩劫 here, which translates to ‘imperialism catastrophe.’

 

I really wasn't sure what to expect from this one, and it certainly wasn't what I got, but it was pretty good overall. It had some very intense action moments, but very little substance that at least was overtly stated.

There was a lot of subtext such as the conversation after the gas station, where and who the press were safe with, and how it ended it, that makes it deeper than the criticisms would have you believe, but it does feel like a bait and switch and semi cop out avoiding any and all modern politics. I think the only moment that was close to real, was Lee's backstory and what her big photo breakout was about.

You know it's uncontroversial when you have to make things up to try to argue about. That article about the non-white deaths and POC characters serving as white character motivation is just nonsense.

 

annihilation
devs
ex machina
dredd
civil war


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men

 

Saw this a second time. If you don't try to make it deeper than it is, it really is just one great film sequence after another. It's kind of crazy how good it is at times.

I was explaining to a buddy that this is a war film more in the vein of 1917 and Dunkirk. It's more about the heart than the head. It's less, "How does what you think make you feel?" and more, "How does what you feel make you think?"

For what it's worth, seeing the footage of campus protests today I really thought about the person behind the camera for the first time. Raw footage has looked different to me since watching this.

 

Didn’t realize so many people looked down on Men and so hard. Anyone care to expand on why? This is not a trap.

 

I think it’s incredibly heavy handed in a way his previous work was not imo. He set out to make a horror movie about something that I’m not sure he was the right person for. I do think the man being born over and over again in slow mo at the end was cool.

 

Men creeped me the fuck out. Good horror movie if you ask me.

 

Yea it didn’t bother me but I’m not into horror at all. I just watch as much A24 stuff as possible and close my eyes a lot

 

This is going to get an Oscar nom for sound mixing, right?


Right?

 

I think they do the gunshot in the middle of a quiet scene gimmick at least four times in the first hour.

What a stupid, unpleasant movie. Almost every time you start to get engaged a character does or says something so nonsensical that you can't believe this was made.

1. After seeing his two friends being held captive by soldiers, he says they will be safe because they are press. How dumb can you be? Even without being in an active war, anyone would know that journalists are going to be a target if you are going to report on something you are trying to hide. Again, they are literally holding your friends hostage and it appears they were forcefully removed from their car.

2. The line "what kind of American are you?" is heavy-handed, but from the trailer it appeared to be a central moment showing just how divisive this war had been among people that were originally countrymen. Instead, it just a random xenophobic aside, ultimately meaning nothing.

3. Obviously the President is not going to be in a couple of cars driving directly through the tanks and machine guns. Why does Dunst have to have a sixth sense to know that when the military doesn't? Why does the military only send a half-dozen soldiers to take the entire White House? Why would you summarily execute the unarmed President while it is being photographed? How does Priscilla have enough time to recover from being tackled, turn around, and take a picture before Dunst is shot from the bullet she was trying to save her from?

Like Nolan's Batman films, Garland wants to reach for political relevance without actually saying anything. Charlottesville is a central location for a reason, and by having the rebelling states not really corresponding to any relevant political battle, it is not about anything.

 

That’s why I said go see challengers!

 

Civil War started earlier.

 

Might be in the minority in this site but I enjoyed Civil War much more than Challengers