Review: Civil War

Alex Garland's Civil War isn't titled Civil War 2 - which is what it technically depicts - or The Second American Civil War or anything like that, because it's not meant to be a prediction of a reality to come. In fact, it strenuously avoids anything in the big picture that could be mistaken for realism. The main military force is an alliance between Texas and California which okay, might happen. As for the actual causes of this civil war, they're never mentioned.

While some have praised the film's commitment to just dropping the viewer into the conflict and letting them figure it out, Garland doesn't really give the viewer enough information to figure anything out - which is a little ironic, considering all the main characters are journalists and at least one of the themes in this murky film is "how far should you go in your commitment to document the truth?" Turns out these guys will do pretty much anything to get the story, they just can't be bothered telling it to anyone.

So while the President (Nick Offerman, seen only briefly at the beginning and end of the film) is presented as a babbler disconnected from reality, well, name a recent President who wasn't. All we know of his political achievements is that he disbanded the FBI, messed around with the rules as far as drone strikes on American citizens, and had a third term. Sure, maybe he's a fascist dictator; maybe he disbanded the FBI because of its long history of abusing civil rights and ran for a third term because the country was already at war with itself. We don't know.

Not only do we have a conflict with no cause, we have a conflict that's clearly not designed to reflect current warfare. There are no drones; the US Navy must have decided to sit it out because one aircraft carrier parked outside Washington DC would have ended the war in about half an hour. Military technology is roughly on the level of the Vietnam War, or maybe Gulf War One: tanks, automatic weapons, rocket launchers, humvees.

The scenes of war we're shown are also generic. There are gun battles and refugee camps, armed guards at stores and looters hung and tortured. There's a mass grave, a sniper who seems to be shooting indiscriminately, a suicide bomber. These scenes are always effective and often chilling, but for a generation of viewers used to zombie movies and The Walking Dead, or just who've seen Spielberg's War of the Worlds, it's all pretty much what you'd expect.

Likewise, our lead characters are the kind of war correspondents that are familiar from wars gone by. These are photojournalists who still shoot on film; while there's one mention of an upload, and we're told there's no phone service, digital cameras don't seem to be a thing. Characters work for Reuters or "what's left of the New York Times"; nobody's posting pictures of war crimes on social media.

So the war is a metaphor; we have to look elsewhere for meaning. It's tempting to look at the characters: Lee (Kirsten Dunst) is a war-weary photographer, Joel (Wagner Moura) is her slightly more enthusiastic journalist buddy. They're planning to go to Washington DC to interview the President before his regime falls. Tagging along is fresh-faced newcomer Jesse (Cailee Spaney), who is just starting out as a photojournalist and who idolises Lee, and Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), a senior writer who is tagging along on what might be the last big story of his career.

There are some obvious moves here. Jessie is going to learn what it takes to make it, Lee is going to have to figure out if this is still what she wants to do with her life. Garland sketches all this stuff in off-handedly, though the performances are strong. It's tempting to suggest this is a film about the cost of being detached and the price you pay as an individual for journalistic detachment.

These are people able to dispassionately observe their own country tear itself apart, working the shutter of their cameras as their homeland dies in front of them. There's a cost to that, and as we get to the climax of the film some characters embrace that cost and others question it. But the film is barely interested in its characters as people; much of the film simply requires them to be observers, their own stories largely kept in the background.

What the film is more interested in is the end of the USA. The opening is the President getting ready to give a speech about how the separatists have been crushed, and the system as we know it is set to be restored. It's not until a few scenes later that we realise he's full of shit. The US government has lost the war, and everyone expects the President to be dead within weeks.

That conversation between journalists also sketches in the basic state of play across the nation; there's at least three separate factions out there, and only their hatred of the President and his forces is keeping them united. While the film as it progresses seems to be driving towards a firm conclusion, we've already been told that no end is in sight.

Everything we see in the film - constant lethal violence, rampant mistrust, an unending sense of threat behind every action - is now and for the foreseeable future the status quo in America. This explains why the war is so basic, so hand-to-hand: it's not about forces fighting for territory or resources, it's about a country where neighbour wants nothing more than to murder their neighbour.

What gives Civil War it's power - and despite its many flaws and flat patches, it does end up a powerful film - is that it ends up gleefully reveling in the disaster it portrays, a zombie movie that says we deserve to be eaten. The state of the nation is a nightmare, the film says, where friend has turned against friend, brother against brother. And the solution is to find someone to blame.

The final act of the film involves the storming of Washington and the White House, and it's easily the high point of the film. Garland kicks things into pure action mode as we follow a military unit (and our tag-along leads) as they fight their way into the war torn city, complete with monuments coming under fire. Civil War is seemingly about the importance of a media committed to objectivity, but the film itself only comes to life when it's reveling in the fruits of bias and division.

Going by the current state of US political discourse no doubt there's a large audience out there right now keen to see either their current or the previous head of state gunned down like a dog. The President here is kept so vague he could be from either party or neither; he's politically a blank slate, simply "The President".

Civil War says the desire for this kind of thing is a poison that will tear the country apart, and then it serves that poison right on up.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Late Night with the Devil

It's proof of the strength of its concept that Late Night with the Devil works as well as it does. Recreating antique television is a tricky job, and this often manages to be a weird mix of on-the-money and slapdash at the very exact same time. Without a note-perfect performance from David Dastmalchian at its heart, this would be little more than an interesting (and creepy) experiment; he's what makes this movie soar even as the talk show within it goes wildly off the rails.

That winning concept is a episode of a late-70s late night talk show, supposedly taken direct from recently discovered master tapes, in which a very special theme night goes horribly wrong. But first there's a documentary-style prologue to get us up to speed on both the era's Satanic Panic and the path to not-quite-success taken by host Jack Delroy, quickly bringing us to the point where a Halloween special featuring psychics, debunkers, and a young girl raised to be a demonic sacrifice who just might be possessed herself seems like a ratings winner.

Australian directors Cameron and Colin Cairnes do a great job with the look of the talk show. It's the kind of thing where you know there are probably flaws there somewhere, but it captures the overall vibe so well that you can forgive some dubious camera angles. But during the ad breaks we cut to "behind-the-scenes" black and white footage that doesn't make (technical) sense at all. It provides useful backstory and fills in some gaps, but it's basically shot like a modern film, the kind of footage they couldn't have taken at the time.

While these scenes are technically jarring, they do make sense (and work pretty well) if you forget all the "this was an actual event that happened" stuff and see this as a horror movie that just happens to take place in a television studio. Which is a reasonable way to look at things, even if it does impose a different set of limitations on the material. If you're not going to pretend it's a real episode of a real show, why bother filming 2/3rds of the film like it is?

Some of the other flaws are more understandable. Events come to a boil early on, followed by a stretch where not a lot overtly happens to further crank up the tension; the whole idea of putting in a big moment early on then letting the (boring) story play out for another half hour or more is so ingrained in current script writing that it's not so much a flaw as just another example of a trend.

But horror, more than any other genre in cinema today, remains one where film makers are encouraged to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks (before slowly sliding down, leaving a bloody trail behind). Audiences expect horror films to be an uneven collection of moments that work and scenes that fail; even slow-burn classics of the genre often have a couple of missteps we forgive them for.

Fortunately here, the good outweighs the bad. The fake show is convincing enough to provide a decent backdrop for the slow descent into nightmare, with just enough reversals to explain why people don't get the hell out of there (plus, as we're told multiple times, this is showbiz, and it's all part of the act). There's a nice variety of horror on display here as well, ranging from the creepy to the gory to the nastily brutal to a few surreal moments - though again, the enemy of terror is over-explanation, and this often spells things out that we already grasped through earlier insinuation.

There's one moment towards the end where the film shifts gears and a character finds themselves in a very different situation from everything that's come before. That "oh shit, they're really going there" realisation threatens to turn this from being merely pretty good into something truly special.

... and then they use that shift to fill in backstory rather than pile on the surreal horror. So close.

- Anthony Morris

 

Review: Monkey Man

 

Dev Patel's directorial debut Monkey Man was heading for a straight-to-streaming Netflix slot before Jordan Peele saw it and decided it was too good to bypass cinemas. It's not hard to see why. Directed with style and energy, it's the kind of full-bore experience that works best on the big screen. But too good for streaming? That depends what kind of streaming you're talking about.

In recent years it's become obvious that while at-home isn't the best venue for every film, there are certain genres that can thrive in the streaming environment. Romantic comedies might be having a comeback on the big screen, but that's building on years of re-introducing viewers to their charms via countless direct-to-streaming features. And action films, the kind of bruising, no holds-barred, relentless onslaughts of crippling violence that fans love to see? Streaming is where it's at.

Which is why it's for the best that Monkey Man has gone to cinemas first, because as far as action goes this is good - but not great. Some fights are effectively nasty; others threaten to bring back the much-loathed shaky-cam approach where "action" equals "keeping the camera moving so you can't tell what's going on". There are strong moments here, but there's just not enough of them for a film based around violent vengeance.

So what else does this have to offer? What initially seems like your traditional tale of roaring revenge as the Kid (Patel) inflitrates a luxury hotel built on drugs and prostitution then takes a swerve into the (slightly) mystical as the Kid finds himself rescued by a outcast group of local trans women and realises that the corruption and religious exploitation he's fighting against stretches far beyond his own personal suffering.

The Indian setting (the film was shot in Indonesia) is never quite as distinctive as it promises to be, but the often pointed political commentary provides some useful depth to the cartoony plot. Most recent action films seem eager to avoid having anything to say; this at least says something, and is a better film for it.

Patel himself makes for a strong lead. His tall, wiry physicality is used to good effect, especially early on when his desire for revenge is burning him up from the inside; later scenes, where he's a much more focused character, aren't as threatening as they should be.

As a mix of comic-book plotting (where the hero's first attempt at defeating the bad guys fails, so he has to go and regroup before trying again) and offbeat moments (the Kid's training montage is scored by a local musician while the trans women cheer on his sweaty shirtless antics), it's a good backbone for an action thriller. But once you look past the often flashy style, the thrills aren't quite there.

Patel stages some sequences effectively, but others rely more on energy generated with the camera than what we're seeing in front of it. There's a brief John Wick reference early on, which makes for a nice joke; it's also a reminder that those films were all about showcasing the physical skill of the performers by filming the action clearly and simply. It's a lesson Patel might want to take to heart next time he gets behind the camera.

- Anthony Morris