Short Take: Review Civil War (2024)

Just saw Civil War (2024)

It is the best version of itself it could have been GIVEN THE TRAILER. (It’s still dumb as hell, just not cringe)

If you look really closely at the edges you can see the points scoring politics and how they scammed Hollywood into funding it...

But the entire conceit of the film is it's like 20 years into the war and no one even knows what's being fought over. There are 3 factions that aren't fleshed out, at all, and for 90% of the runtime it has a heart of darkness/Apocalypse now detachment. We don’t even know which side most of the fighters are on most of the movie… Just vague militias and forces who seem to have forgotten which sid they’re even on.

I've often thought SECOND CIVIL WAR films should be one of the largest genres in cheap indy Cinema, you just pick an obscure war movie about a war Americans know bugger all about, and take the concept ... like The Beast and the soviet-Afghan War with a lone tank lost in hostile territory, or '71 and the Irish Troubles with a multi faction war over a misplaced soldier.... Then you remake it with American names and some environmental worldbuilding. BAM instant audience interest.

AND THEY DID EXACTLY THAT. Except they picked the only movie it wouldn't work for. They picked War Photographer with Christian Frei.

And yes, they 100% did so to score points and praise "brave journalists" and yes the film does end with the "brave journalists" following a multiculti platoon lead by a Black Female sergeant into the Whitehouse to shoot a "3 term president" (white male)...who its been given enough hints that shitlibs can cheer at a surrogate trump being shot… but that's not the reason it doesn't work.

Somehow a story set 20 years into a civil war, in the future, takes place in the 1990s and Reuters photojournalists are the ones documenting the war in real time... instead of what actually happens, which is teenage youtubers with go-pros do it.

Likewise it’s a dumb version of a photojournalism story where none of the ethical or moral considerations are shown, no one is ever tempted to pay subjects to act out in unnatural ways, they never take a photo of a dying child and then just leave him to die like Kevin Carter with The Vulture and the Little Girl ...

We're treated to the sight of a NECKLACING KILLING (look it up) at the start of the film, and it never again reaches that height of what photojournalism and war photography WAS in the 90s in Africa...

Likewise the characters aren't fleshed out, their arcs are non-existent to cringe...

But none of that really matters to me, because it didn't do what I'd feared, which is make it one long ultra-cringe preachy Hollywood polemic about "populism" that kills the genre.

Assuming this makes money, then indy directors right out of film school will make their first film a guerilla horror film in their backyard and clothes on their back with Zero budget, and then move onto making a "Second Civil War" film in Detroit or Pennsylvania with zero budget.

So despite having all the ethnographics you'd expect, no insights into modern warfare, a complete detachment from any reality of modern war journalism (the real war journalism not the stuff the NYT does), and dropping all of its character arcs to end off with a black woman shooting a surrogate Trump.... And it certainly no insight into American political tensions: There’s A refugee camp is which poor blacks and whites forced to live in close proximity, and it’s treated as a kumbaya peaceful moment… in real life it’d be on the edge of Race War like we see in America’s prisons and merely poor neighborhoods.

But in spite of all that:

I'm actually kind of happy it exists and worked the bare minimum amount it did...

Because now indy film makers can make good second civil war movies and do stuff like Empire of the Sun but in Virginia, or Barry Lyndon but in Vegas, or This land of Mine but in the Everglades, or Come and See but in West Virginia.

Seriously if you’ve ever wanted to be an Indy filmmaker… Go out and remake a pitch black period piece/war film like “Paths of Glory” or “The Third Man” or “Cold Mountain” or “The Wall” (2017) or “Downfall” but set it in your little corner of America during some future war you never explain except in vague John Milius-Esque suggestions like he did with “the Siege of Denver” and other little bits of worldbuilding in Red Dawn.

.

As for Real war Journalism I recommend the podcast “Judging Freedom with Andrew Napolitano” (yes the former FOX guy). Whose conservative legal podcast weirdly evolved into maybe the best blow by blow Ukraine and Israel podcast out there today.

Paleo-Libertarians are just weird like that.

Follow me on Twitter: @FromKulak

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