We wrestle with the weight of legacy, the Devil, and EL TOPO

But let's start with the film we can't stop thinking about

I can’t stop thinking about Alex Garland’s Civil War.

This is an interesting moment for A24 as a studio. This opened like a big mainstream commercial hit, but that’s not the movie at all. It feels just as personal and idiosyncratic as any of Garland’s previous films, but wrapped in a high concept that the studio managed to instantly explain with their marketing. “It’s America. There’s a civil war.” It’s the kind of thing that immediately sinks a hook, and they leaned on one particular scene with Jesse Plemons and the imagery of firefights in Washington D.C. without really selling the film’s actual story. It’s a very smart campaign, and they deserve whatever success they have with the film, which plays more like an Alex Garland film than I’m sure some viewers expected.

By now, he’s established a fairly strong identity as a filmmaker, and he never attacks things from the most obvious perspective. I love Annihilation, I love Ex-Machina, I think Dredd is a blast, and Devs was a fascinating swing at TV. Garland makes movies like he’s studying a different species, and there’s a degree of suspicion in his worldview that feels honest. Annihilation is not a film that feels optimistic about humanity. Ex-Machina is not a feel-good relationship picture. Civil War has no interest in coddling you or giving you an easy out. I’ve heard all the complaints about the “politics” of the film, and I think it’s a huge mistake to try to directly map the events and characters of the film onto today’s current landscape. That movie would be dated by the split second you release it in theaters, and everyone would walk in already knowing how they felt about things. The national discourse is already so violently fragmented that I’m not sure how anyone could make a movie that would do anything but reinforce all the division if they tried to do a movie about Trump’s third term or whatever. That movie would have no shelf life, while I suspect Garland’s film is going to age well. It is jaded on a foundational level, viewing the press as ghoulish and detached, and I’m not sure I can argue against the thesis that Garland seems to be arguing here. I would argue our press is in worse shape right now than it’s been at any point in my life, and while I think there is plenty of good work being done by journalists around the world, I also think the entire idea of journalism has been devalued and undermined, and not by accident. When a large percentage of Americans do not trust anything they see or hear in the mainstream media, that’s a huge issue, and it’s worth interrogating how we got to that place.

image courtesy of A24

As usual, I have far more faith in individuals than I do in groups or institutions. Civil War doesn’t feel like it came out of a process where there was a large committee signing off on every choice. Alex Garland’s films feel personal, even on a canvas this large, and that feels increasingly rare in a business that is all about turning everything into Corporate Content, IP that exists to service a revenue stream instead of art. Garland has said he’s done with filmmaking, that the entire system holds no appeal for him anymore. I have heard more than one filmmaker I admire echo that sentiment in the last few years, and there’s a distinct possibility we will lose more than one filmmaker out of sheer irritation before the decade is done. I am thrilled at the idea of Guillermo Del Toro embracing animation for any story he chooses to tell that way, but I hope he does not permanently leave live-action behind. I know how tough the system has been on him at times because he dreams bigger than the people writing the checks these days, and there are only so many times you can get your heart broken before you stop trying.