Alex Garland
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‘Civil War’ Shows American Divisions Through a Glass June 17, 2024
“Holy S***! What a F****** rush!” exclaims Joel, a cocky Hispanic photojournalist, after he watches rebel militants execute uniformed soldiers captured in a firefight early in Alexander Garland’s Civil War. The character, played gratingly by Narcos s...
Civil War Tedium May 06, 2024
I entered the empty theater in Brooklyn very much wanting to like Alex Garland’s Civil War. It was one of the last days my neighborhood theater was going to play the film and I wanted to make sure I saw it; the mere fact that it wasn’t based on any p...
‘Civil War’ and Civic Anxiety April 24, 2024
DAVID ROONEY: We’re nearing the middle of one of the most contentious election years in America’s history, with bitter divisions making a mockery of the increasingly obsolete appellation, “United States.” People are ANXIOUS as they weigh a presidenti...
'Civil War': A Shallow and Dangerous Fantasy April 19, 2024
The new film Civil War may want to be edgy, timely, even thoughtful, but it has nothing to offer beyond surface-level thrills, which makes its grisly portrayal of war feel more like a romanticization of the worst in humans than a warning against it.A...
This Isn’t Working April 19, 2024
Place your hand on the ground of American politics. Keep it there a moment. You’ll feel a deep rumble like A Minor Forest “math rock” song playing off in the distance. The sound of uncontrollable discontent hangs in the air. The country’s demise beck...
American Carnage April 19, 2024
In Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 classic Apocalypse Now, a US patrol boat heads upriver during the Vietnam War to assassinate Colonel Kurtz, a rogue commander whose followers worship him as a god. In writer-director Alex Garland’s new film Civil War, f...
How to Both-Sides a “Civil War” April 18, 2024
Years ago, when I was a freelance journalist desperate for work, I went to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, on a press junket for a big-budget disaster movie. The movie was “2012,” and it was directed by Roland Emmerich, the German box-office savant known as t...
'Civil War’s' Mystifying Vision of American Meltdown April 17, 2024
In late September 2001, two weeks after 9/11, The Onion published one of its most memorable headlines: “American Life Turns Into Bad Jerry Bruckheimer Movie.” “For nearly two full weeks,” the article reads, Americans had been “transfixed in front of ...
Why Is 'Civil War' So Evasive? April 17, 2024
I’ve never heard gunshots like the ones in Civil War. Or, rather, I’ve never heard them in a movie. If you’ve ever been to a firing range, or just lived in a city for a while, you know the sound, a dry, brittle snap so unlike the seat-rattling boom w...
Alex Garland’s Doomer Claptrap April 16, 2024
Based on the trailer, many people—me included—assumed Alex Garland’s new film Civil War would go full Rachel Maddow and project liberals’ direst fears about Donald Trump’s second term onto the silver screen. Something like: Jan. 6, Part II: When Depl...
‘Civil War’ Review April 15, 2024
THE THING THAT CIVIL WAR CAPTURES about sectarian conflict is that it is not typically a coherent ideological struggle, one forcing the final result of arguments unheeded. Rather, it is a function of survival—he’s shooting at me, so I’m shooting at h...
Civil Larp: The Journalists Are at It Again April 15, 2024
Alex Garland’s Civil War is not just a story told from the point of view of journalists, which would be taxing enough. It’s a movie about journalism, which is a hilariously narrow and tedious preoccupation for a movie that’s nominally concerned with ...
War Is Hell, Ain’t It? April 12, 2024
“What’s so civil about war, anyway?” asked Axl Rose back in 1990, when he and his band had the world’s ear. Nobody would accuse Guns N’ Roses of being a political act like, say, U2, but releasing a single that paid homage to Martin Luther King Jr. wh...
Civil War: What Is It Good For? April 11, 2024
War is politics by other means. Except, that is, in Civil War, the much-hyped new movie from director Alex Garland out this week, which offers 109 minutes of bangs and explosions, but no real plot and no politics to speak of. That is a stunning accom...
'Civil War' Plays Like a Nightmare April 11, 2024
The year is unspecified—it could be a few years into some alternate future, or it could be right now. The president, a clean-cut establishment type played by Nick Offerman, is unnamed, his party and political affiliations unclear (though his rhetoric...
'Civil War' Was Made in Anger April 10, 2024
When the first trailer for Alex Garland’s new movie, Civil War—a harrowing depiction of conflict between American states in the near future—was revealed, a wave of bafflement spread across the internet. Incredulous articles questioned the conditions ...
On 'Civil War' March 18, 2024
Whatever you expect from an Alex Garland movie, he always gives you something else."Civil War" is something else again. It premiered in the US hours before I published this and it's already divisive. I look forward to reading all of the arguments for...
